One of the most annoying thing for web developers over the last five years has been the customer insistence on “keywords”. Mainly because of all the misunderstandings surrounding that term.

Customers would even call or email asking if we could buy some keywords for them.

And woe betide us if they couldn’t be found in the search engines for a certain query. It had to be our fault because we had forgotten the keyword!

So at their insistence, we felt compelled to waste our time adding all those barely relevant terms to their web pages.

We felt compelled because we knew it was a completely useless addition to the website.

Of course, the main reason keywords didn’t work was because everyone abused them. So in the end, search engines just said, let’s ignore the keywords and concentrate on what this website is REALLY about, rather than what the web owner would like us to think it is about.

But for about a year now we’ve had the feeling that just maybe they were starting to matter again.

Yesterday, I was researching “web 2 design”. (In fact, I should probably have been researching “web 2.0 design”, and my search results might have been more prolific. But it is often wise to get round the terms rather than hit them straight on.)

So after digging my fill of O’Reilly, and spoiling my head with del.icio.us flickr’s, I was doing some housekeeping on this site and, without much thought, I added the phrase mentioned earlier to the keywords of one of the pages. That was yesterday.

This evening I continued my researches, and hit Google again with the same query. What a shockeroonie. We are (probably were, by the time anyone reads this) top of the world for the phrase ‘web 2 design’.

Of course, after the initial surprise, I realized it is not as clearcuttingly in favour of the keywords thesis as it might first seem.

We are probably the only website in the world that happens to have mentioned that phrase anywhere on the site at all - how modern are we!- and the keyword does come into action in this case.

More research needed.