About maximum KWs allowed

[Daryl Craft]

Hello,
I was wondering if the maximum allowed characters is truly 1000, and what happens if you exceed this are they spit out by the engines or what. I don't mean going insane with them but slightly exceeding by 50 or so does this have any negative effects on your sites rankings.....

[Mel]

Hi Daryl:

Depends on the search engine, some don't use them at all and some do, but the most common mistake is to put too many keywords in the tag. Each tag applies only to the page it is on not sitewide and you can usually only efectiveley target about three keyphrases per page.

My rule of thumb is to only put into the keywords tag phrases which are also in your page title, and on your page itself, and this will seldom be more than three phrases.

With reference to the keywords tag don't think characters, don't think words think phrases seperated by commas.

[kingman]

To Mel,
I find your advice quite interesting. This is so completely different than what I was taught about keywords. Can you expound on what you know? I am thinking that this would make a good sticky topic for this forum.

I have always gone by the thousand character rule. I make sure that my most important key word is also first in my title. Then I am sure that my keywords are used in the page. As many as I can, anyway. I attended a seminar once on how search engines work. They talked about how se's use a scoring system and the keywords are part of the system they use.

[Daryl Craft]

I also assumed the 1000 character rule. But I have read allot of information lately that is contradicting everything I thought I knew about tagging. Such as in some cases taggs are not even relavent, nor is content.

[Mel]

It is not a constant across all search engines with the importance varying according to the tag - engine pair.

For instance IMO the only SEs that Use the KW metatag for any sort of ranking, are MSN,Yahoo and Altavista, but all the search engines use the page title in some way when ranking, and many use the meta description. I do advise using the keywords meta tag since the three engines above use it, but suggest that you do not try to stuff it full of keywords that have nothing to do with that page.

What is fairly constant however it that head tags apply only to the pages they are located on, Most search engines use the Page title as the SERP title and many engines use some or all of the meta description in the SERP description, thus making them doubly important - they are used for ranking and more importantly they are the only sales tool you have to use to convince the searchers who see your high rankings that yours is the page they should go to.