keyword anorexia?

[nickymccatty]

I am designing a new website for a synagogue that's getting too old. The existing minyan (congregation) is a lot like older adults who always bought the same brand of car; now, they need to attract all the younger buyers who just don't shop the same way.

When I started looking at how to do their metatags, I searched for other conservative shuls, looked at the keywords for the top results, and went from there. My surmise about what's needed is a variety of angles, since people who might visit this congregation will be coming for a variety of reasons. It's religiously liberal, egalitarian & participatory, politically centrist to progressive, and a good place for a bar or bat mitzvah, among other things. For these reason, among others, I thought that the keyword content should be kinda rich.

One of the people on the committee read the articles on Google, and now they want a set of keywords that looks just plain anorexic to me. I know that the actual text is critically important. What I'd like your opinions on is whether search results can be harmed by getting too fearful about The Algorithm's thinking that they're keyword stuffing?

Here is the list that got submitted to me, please let me know what you think.

synagogue, Jewish, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Shabbat, High Holiday, participatory, egalitarian, Hebrew, kiddush, Boston, Torah, conservative, Ben Zion Gold

Thanks.

[incrediblehelp]

I dont even use keyword tags in my clients websites as they are usually ignored.

[activeco]

The "metatags" is not synonym for SEO anymore (for several years). Especially 'keywords' tag is almost of no use today.
Many keywords/phrases your client provided don't have much sense. Why would "Cambridge", "Massachusetts", "participatory", "egalitarian", "Boston", "conservative"... be related to a Jewish congregation?
Instead, it should be something like "bar mitzvah Boston", "synagogue Massachusetts", etc.
You have to think of keyphrases as a very short description of the content and if you want to rank for particular keywords you have to adjust/create content which would reflect it. Pure staffing of keywords somewhere does not work and can only harm a site.
If you want to check what keywords/phrases Google sees in your pages try this tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (chose 'Website content' radio button), which also returns the level of general interest in particular phrases.