newbie questions about Description length and repetition

[KathyA]

Does anyone know how long my Description meta tag should be? I've heard limits of 150 characters, up to 1000 characters.

Also, I know that Keywords should be 1000 characters. But as for repetition, is repeating a keyword 3 times too much?

What about Title? I've heard 60 characters?

Thank you so much!!!
K

[Marcia]

Kathy, 60, 150 and 1000 are pretty generally accepted normss, but by no means inflexible.

Google truncates the titles at 60 characters, which is about 8 to 10 words, while Inktomi shows longer titles. Staying at around 60 or a little above is by no means unreasonable.

For repetitions I personally try to stay with once in the title, twice in the description and three in the keywords tag, and try to have 3 words in between occurrences of a word. For the keywords tag, a word shouldn't be in it unless it also appears in the page text; and since it's best to limit the number of keywords a page will be optimized for, it's sometimes best to limit the number of different words in the keywords meta tag, which could limit the number of times a word is used. I've got some with a number of words because they'll be used in combination to find the page, some have only one phrase altogether, and some pages have no meta tags at all. They have very little value nowadays.

Those sound like good basic guidelines, but it's not a fixed rule. There can always be variables depending on the site and the page.

[KathyA]

Oh, great. Thank you for the info!!

[ebgreen]

Since GOOGLE, AltaVista, and Fast-AllTheWeb are really the only search engines left and GOOGLE does not rank index pages very high (In my opinion), I make my index Title a lot longer. I have had terrific success o AltaVista and Fast with long index page Titles. My rankings on GOOGLE are the best of any search engine I am on, but I do not get much out of the index page.