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A friend of mine (who designed his own homemade jewelry business site) tells me that there is a maximum number of keyword characters that should be utilized under <meta name="keywords" content=. He tells me this number is 250 (characters); & that search engine spiders ignore everything beyond those initial 250.
Is this true?
Thanks,
mark4man
The main point about the keywords meta tag (if you're going to use it at all) is to list those words and phrases that are really "key" and also uniquely relevant to the page itself. Site-wide or directory-wide keywords are a waste of bandwidth, IMO. Let your index pages handle those.
Much outdated information is still served on the web about the keywords meta tag - beware of strnge advice from pages authored in 1998. The tag just doesn't mean much today, and many very successful websites don't use one at all. I still use it as a kind of memo pad for what searches I am aiming at with any given page. But I don't use anywhere near 255 characters, to say nothing of going over that number.
Some site search programs and also web directories do use the meta keyword, so I find it helpful for these situations to have one in place from the time the page is first created. But a keyword list is not like an order form for traffic, it's just a helper tool. No search engine is going to take the word of a hidden meta tag to decide what a page's relevance is really all about.
mark4man
