How many characters in meta-tags?

[A_rookie]

Hello all,
I was wondering if anyone knows how many characters one is allowed to use / are useful in the various metatags? I have once read that the keywords tag has a max of 744 characters? Is this correct?

[caNative]

First of all you need to understand that Google does NOT use the keyword META tag for ranking. This tag has been overly abused in the past and is not a very good SEM tool these days. Having said that...here's a loose list of things to remember:

Limit Keyword list to no more than 20 targeted phrases of two or more words.
Separate using comma with no spaces.
Avoid repeating keywords more than 3-7 times
Repetition up to 3 times is ok, just don't place them one after the other.
Limit it to 1024 characters. List keywords in order of importance. Don't repeat the same keyword more than 7 times.

[ritualcoffee]

are your meta tags for a site search or external search engines?

[nippi]

I have pages that I have tested in the last 3 months, where a word ONLY appears in meta tags and still comes up on search.

Also, personal experience shows far more pages with PRO that are missing meta tags.

Perhaps weighting for meta is very low, but I think WRONG to say google does nto care if they are there or not

look here [webmasterworld.com...]

[domokun]

my general rule of thumb is:
60 characters for the title
200 characters for the description
and 800 characters for the keywords (comma seperated, do not repeat a phrase more than 3 times)

oh, and dont stuff them full of keywords. use them as they were intended

[Navdeep]

my idea is to use keyword phrases rather than single words.
phrases can include targeted words. length of description 20-25 words and title 10 - 12 words. and keywords phrases not more than 30.