I was curious if Google (or other search engines) penalize for too many keywords listed in the keyword META tag in my HTML. What is an optimal amount of keywords, and how many is too many?
Use your main ones and few alternative ones. I use up 20 keywords, but ive seen people using keyword lists of 100 keywords. I suggest start with less, optimize your page, so you can be found using these keywords and then add more keywords and optimize for new keywords. I dont know if it is 100% perfect, but i use it...
The current advice is not to bother at all with the 'keyword' metatag. Sadly all the major search engines ignore it. (If anyone has info to the contrary do let us all know) The 'description' metatag doesn't strictly count in SEO terms either, except that it gets displayed on Search Engine Results Pages and therefore should be included.
Google won't penalise for it, because they'll complete ignore it - as it says in Google Webmaster Central Blog I notice that you do not mention the keywords meta tag - does this mean that Google totally ignores it? December 4, 2007 3:37 AM John Mueller said... Thanks for asking, Glen! You're right in that we generally ignore the contents of the "keywords" meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes - it won't count against you. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/answering-more-popular-picks-meta-tags.html
Hmm nice info, thanks, I did hear it somewhere, but knowing SEO is a hell lot of myths i just ignored it... Opened my eyes a little
To say that Google completely ignores the metatags is not technically correct... The description keyword on my website shows up in the SERPs as the main description, which means they at least read it into their system. In addition, I was once "warned" by the Google webmaster tools that the meta description fields were the same on 7 of my webpages. This means that they likely also use them to detect duplicate content. Now, whether they actually count for anything when it comes to ranking is something that might not happen. However, I noticed that during my campaign I received 1st page rankings on the 3 keywords I have in my meta keywords tag much sooner than I did on keywords that I was targeting more heavily in the content and inbound links. IMHO it is safer bet to use them than to ignore them as long as they are not abused. Don't repeat keywords over and over - 3 is the maximum for any single word (although I know for a fact that you can get away with 4 on Google). Don't overdo the keywords in your meta description. I read somewhere that the maximum length you should put in the keywords tag is 1055 characters and the maximum description length you should put is 255 characters. On the other hand, I was warned by Google webmaster tools also when the description was too short - you should have at least 2-3 sentences there. The description should accurately describe the page. Oh, and make sure all of the keywords relate closely to the content on your site. The meta keywords tag is a good place to put common misspellings.
I have been told that if you repeat a keyword more than 5 times in your metatag, Google will not like it. In my metatags, one SEO websites said I had used "law" too many times. I am not sure whether I should remove one of the references to "law" or leave it.