Text string on page changed around in meta

Would it count with SE's?

[StaceyJ]

I'm revisitng my keywords tag after removing them from about half the pages of a site quite awhile ago. I realize that there are still some (Y!) that at least look at it and may count it for something. I've been reading many threads lately and came across this interesting one [webmasterworld.com ]. I have a question regarding on page text and similar but not identical text in the meta tag.

If I have "...cool widgets for guys..." as text on the page, and I want to put "guys cool widgets" as a keyword phrase in the meta tag, would that be a match as the SE's see it or not? Or would it not count since it's not the identical string but all the words are on the page?

Reason I ask is I used to use "widgets,cool,guys," type of keywords and want to get more creative while not be spammy. I only want to use a few select keywords/phrases on each page. What do you think?

[callivert]

I can't see this as a problem. Keywords are likely to occur in the text itself - penalising a page for that would not make any sense. If you have an article on the death of Elvis, the words "Elvis" "Graceland" "music" and "death" will likely be keywords, and appear at least once each in the text itself. That would be natural and normal.