By 1998, however, Search Engines had wised up to misuse and more cynical practices. The practice of "stuffing" tags with multiple copies of the same word or even with material unrelated to the contents of the web page was all too common and the keywords tag was rendered next to useless.
Because, historically, there has been a lot of emphasis put on keywords by website designers, the myth about their importance has continued. A look at any search engine forum or a chat about web-design will quickly encompass the keywords topic. Nowadays, however, there is little emphasis placed on them. According to a test performed by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, Google and Microsoft do not use keywords when a search is made.
Inasmuch as it is useful, the keywords tag can be used for misspellings. In the search engines that do use the tag for indexing (Yahoo & Ask), text in the tags is treated as if it was on the page. Misspelling words on your page can have the effect of making you look unprofessional. Hidden away, however, you can encompass common misspellings and not lose face.
As far as getting better rankings is concerned, if the keywords tag was the way, optimizers everywhere would be obsessing on this point. This is not the case and a simple viewing of the source code of any high-ranking site would show you the use of the keywords tag is sparing at best. Keywords will not substitute good copy. Well-written copy will not only get your site ranked but also, the visitors who come to your site will enjoy the content.
Nowadays, search engines worry far more about the links to your site than the keywords text and time spent on keywords is time wasted elsewhere.
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