An interesting question and one which was posed to me by a friend of mine who had noticed an increase in quality score just by having the right keywords in his meta keywords tag. I have to say, that in my short time looking into Quality Score, that on two research projects where I managed to achieve a quality score of 10/10, the keywords were present.

One example was a car rental website with the exact matching keyword ‘car rental in san jose costa rica’ and one was for an exact match ‘how to fix the red ring of death‘ xbox 360 landing page. In the first example, the meta keywords were: “costa rica, car rental, san jose, cheap, discount, 4×4″ and additionally, which may have also contriubuted, the page meta description was: “Vamos Rent-a-Car is the most affordable car rentals company in San Jose Costa Rica offer discount car rental and car hire service with basic insurance and a cell phone included.”

It is interesting to note that in the san jose costa rica example, the keyword did not appear in the body text of the page at all…