Robert_Charlton - 6:47 am on Jun 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

pageoneresults - Another great post. Thanks.

Interesting that you build the page description and title first. I pretty much do the same... and in fact one of the very first things I do after coming up with a prioritized target phrase list is to come up with a generic c15 word description that I can apply to the entire site. For me it's a way of focusing priorities for a site. I then customize this for each optimized page.

In the scheme of things, I think titles are extremely important and that meta keywords are pretty much useless as a tool for ranking, though keywords may be useful in helping you focus your thoughts too. Nevertheless, I've always tried to do them as if they might count.

I've always held descriptions in higher regard than the keywords, and I have always been careful about them. Over the years, I've seen engines display descriptions, drop them, then display them again. They certainly don't ignore them. I'm guessing they may look at them as if they were text higher up on the page, particularly if there is text higher up on the page that reinforces them.

Regarding character limits, here's an old post on the subject that I think still holds... roughly 150 characters, sometimes 200 displayed, with a 250 character max across all engines....

maximum kw meta-desc length
all engines included
[webmasterworld.com...]