you are right - they might backfire (if not used up to date).
White on white is not to be mentioned here, I am also one of those who looked may father ofer his shoulder.
BTW - Google love`s big pictures.
Well me too but here we are in contradiction…
Loading times - even if images are compressed and uploaded at a kb level witch is nearly about to hurt.
On the same time google speed test tool gives you advice to downlevel the kb´s or mb´s (video)
Well, In my opinion, google is more against us than with us and I can tell customers like to see results on duckduckgo and bing (very fast crawling)
just thoughts
No I haven’t requested they are removed, though I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned they are very limited value at best these days and I certainly don’t bother with them myself. I remember a time when keywords were genuinely useful and I was using an app called VSE BeFound that got me to the top of Google in my chosen area, but this was 20 years ago and dropped when Apple moved to OS X.
I have to agree Google poses some challenges that are sometimes contradictory. They seem to want pages with a lot of relevant text, so there is plenty of content to index, but at the same time it should be clean and uncluttered to avoid page bounces from horrified visitors. All of this has to work magically in the blink of an eye with everything in your favour.
And here we are - we are all focusing on Google wishes because our clients want to see themselves properly.
But - forfilling needs of other (still alive) search engines will make the “big brother” curious 
I remember the days when we were looking at Excite, Hotbot, Yahoo, Webcrawler, Altavista and Dogpile. Personally I use startpage quite a lot nowadays, but when thinking about work the only one that really matters is Google.
https://www.startpage.com/ has become a victim of big brother Google.
There are still searchers out there, independent (as far I can tell), and if once postioned - with great effect on google.
E.G
My customer: Beckers Scheune (nueuruppin - Wuthenow)
Put just these words into google, than bing and last into duckduckgo.
Same effort I do with every new breakpoint we have in blocs now - except this anoing white spave within blocs + the Hamurger issue (svg or not - should have been solved by now, hope@norm sticks to his non coder app)
Guys…
I think the sensible thing for @Norm to do is leave them in the program, that way, those who want to use it can use it, and those that don’t want to use it can leave it blank.
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In todays competitive global or local economy, marketing can’t simply rest upon the shielding of a few words. If people are scared or concerned over that they have already failed the needed multifaceted requirements of todays complex marketing strategies.
Funny enough, I designed a site for a company around the year 2000 it was about a 50 page static site. Sadly it has never been updated in absolutely any way since the day of its launch. It included keywords, alt tags, etc., and everything that was white hat prevalent back then regarding SEO. The company name is comprised of two vanilla words each are generic overall with neither being specifically relative to its industry. So name recognition alone is very weak as part of the enormous industry it presides within. To this day it fluctuates ranking #2 or #3 on a Google search, even though it has never been updated in any way since the day the site launched. Its SEO should have tanked more than a decade ago by all practical purposes. Yet by contrast the ever changing SEO compliant content renewing and socially present competition can’t seem to unseat its position. The absence of fresh content alone should have made it falter over time. Not too mention the absence of all social presence or a blog over the years comparative of the competition. Lastly the site was never responsive and the menu system is defunct on mobile devices. So is it an anomaly or evidence of discrepancies of ever changing SEO requirements, even by Google?
I am adept to both sides of the debate, inconsistencies remain and abound in ether direction concerning SEO. The overall SEO topic and debate will remain fluid and organic into infinity, like many others regarding the web.
@Flashman the site search bric uses the keyword field as the search criteria for the page - do you think this might then have a knock on negative effect on search engine ranking?
@sim I’ve never used the site search bric so I am not familiar with it but I just found this documentation. At a guess adding 2-3 keywords there is not going to be a major problem. Stuffing the area with 50 might well be.
ok, I’ll remember that. Thanks.
Adding the keyword on your metatag won’t do much. You have have it so google knows thats are the keyboard you are trying to rank but if you don’t place them on inside your website text its point less. Online you can find some good tools that will help you optimize your page. I use seo power suite, its on subscription but the free version works well swell. Also those guys make a lot of articles about seo optimization that it will be of great help to you.