Keyword Placement in Metatags

[Harold]

Hello,

Thanks for the great replies to my Heading tag posting this morning. I have some questions regarding advice that I received regarding duplicating portions of key word phrases. At the very bottom are my current metatag Title, keywords and description.

Obviously I sell New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox collectibles. I focus on the Patriots.

My question concerns the number of times I can use the word Patriots. I’m relatively new at SEO and at first I had Patriots after every type of collectible. Such as;

New England Patriots pictures, Patriots collectibles, Patriots Memorabilia, Patriots pins and Patriots photographs.

I received feedback that said that I used the term Patriots too many times and that Google is smart enough to automatically add the term Patriots to pins, pictures and photographs, etc. and that I should just list the following

“New England Patriots pictures,collectibles,memorabilia,pins and photographs”.

I was also told to eliminate the space because it took up a character count.

Was this good advise that I received? Before I changed my metatags, I used WebPositionGold and InstantPosition.com and had my metag area 100% optimized but since I started to listen to SEO’s from user groups, the tools have lowered my optimization scores. In real life, I haven’t really seen any change in Google SERPs and rankins.

Since I know Google (but not others like Yahoo) ignore keywords, I’m more concerned about my Title and description. Should I add the term Patriots to a few of the keywords in the title but not all of them?

Thanks, Harry

BELOW ARE MY CURRENT LISTINGS

Title
New England Patriots and Red Sox pictures, collectibles, memorabilia, pins and photographs.

Keywords
new england patriots pictures,collectibles,memorabilia,super bowl,pins,photographs,earrings,panoramic picture,display cases

Description
New England Patriots and Red Sox pictures, collectibles, memorabilia, pins and photographs for the discriminating New England Patriots fan. Providing consignment services for fans who want to sell memorabilia.

[Bernard]

Your title looks good to me. I would drop the period though. I might even replace the word "and" with a hyphen.

Your keywords tags tag is fine as long as every word listed there is repeated in the body of the page. This tag is almost completely meaningless except for perhaps Yahoo. Google practically ignores it.

The description tag does not provide any SEO value AFAIK. It should be used to focus attention for the few instances where a search engine displays it instead of a page snippet. Yours is too long IMO. Search engines will not display that much text in the SERPs.

[North Carolina SEO]

Harold,

I completely agree with Bernard. I would add that the tags are almost exclusively used on some of the smaller search engines and directories which is the reason for keeping them. As Bernard stated, many will be limited to the number of characters (around 100+/-) which yours is beyond. Keep in mind that these keywords/keyphrases are directly related to what is being sought. Having the specific words/phrases on the page (preferably near the top) in the title tag, H1 tags, bold/strong tags makes it easier for the user and the search engines to determine the relevance. IMHO.

[Legend]

Hey that's pretty helpful! thanks

[Mel]

Your tags are OK but not great IMO.

I would not try to target more than two or three search phrases per page and put the rest on other pages with different titles and descriptions.

It appears to me that you are trying to target far too many search phrases on one page.

I would suggest that you target red sox collectibles and red sox memorabilia on one page and other red sox terms on other pages. At the very least use seperate pages for Red Sox and New England Patriots terms.

Trying to target too many terms on one page or in one tag may reduce your rankings.