how many keywords

a question about keywords.

[creditlovers]

hello all, i created a website and i was told that i had to many key words in my meta tags. my questions are:
1.what is the maximum charaters i should use for keywords.
2. should i use commas to differentiate phrases or not?
3.if i dont use commas to differentiate the phrases, how will the search engine know which phrase i want to use?

[Mike_Mackin]

Welcome creditlovers

>i was told that i had to many key words in my meta tags

maybe - maybe not
60 words / 441 charcters

imho the content is light on words
48 / 293

You might load JS from off the page.
You currently have 5661 characters before your content.

[WebManager]

I'm don't think meta keywords are very important these days - especially with Google. Anyone can stick whatever they want in there without the viewer reading it - so they're not a good measure of relevancy for robots.

Certainly make sure your main keywords are listed in there first to give them a boost, and it is a good place to put manufacturers' names, specific product names etc. as a search engine might draw on your meta keywords if these highly specific words can't be found in the content of other pages.

As for length - I have no worries about the length of my meta keywords - there are some highly ranked pages with hundreds of words in there, in all combinations.

[pageoneresults]

> there are some highly ranked pages with hundreds of words in there, in all combinations.

Probably because that particular SE ignores the tag. They could have a thousand words in there and it would not matter.

Many say the keywords tag is dead. I'm not convinced yet. I still use them on primary pages and will typically keep them to about 10, 15, or 20 words maximum. I suggest that you not repeat the same word more than three times. There should also be space between those repeats, for example...

blue widgets california red widgets orange county green widgets southern california

Notice how I have a nice spread balance between the word widgets which is also repeated three times.

Your keywords tag should come from your title, description, main heading and first paragraph on the page. The goal is to tie those elements together.

Also, utilizing your metas properly is just good design practice. First thing I do when building a page is format my title, description, keywords, and sytle/javascript external file references. I also use link relationship metas where applicable.