Meta keywords used to be a direct and significant factor in search engine rankings. They're basically a list of words that you put into the code of your website to tell search engines what your page is about.
Let's go back to our bakery example. If you were creating a webpage about your signature chocolate chip cookies, your meta keywords might be things like "chocolate chip cookies", "homemade cookies", "Marie's Bakery", and so on.
However, over time, search engines like Google and Bing started to ignore meta keywords because people were abusing them (i.e., stuffing them with irrelevant terms). As of now, they don't play a significant role in your search engine rankings.
Instead, search engines have become much more sophisticated, and they focus more on the content on your page, how people interact with it, and many other factors to determine what your page is about and how to rank it.
Although meta keywords don't directly affect your rankings anymore, some other, lesser-known search engines still use them to some degree. Therefore, while they aren't a priority, it doesn't hurt to have them as part of a comprehensive SEO strategy.
