How many is the optimum number? Is it better to be extremely specific, or better to generalise? Does google penalise for irrelevant keywords? Any answers appreciated.
I don't think there's a magic number but I'd keep it under 65 chars. If you look at all listings in google, 65 is the max listing shows. Keyword stuffing is frown upon by google. I would not be surprise that this would be a penalty. No one knows for sure. Better be safe then sorry.
Ok thanks for the advice. But isn't the description 65 chars, rather than the keywords that I can put in the meta tags? btw, like the pagerank checker in your sig.
Actually it depends whether the meta tags are full of descriptive informations or just spam, if there is good informations it can be very long and more than 500 characters. But most of the times its below 250 characters
I usually follow the rule of placing two of my main keywords, followed by 2 of my secondary keywords. If I can work it in there okay. So between 3 and 4 keywords per page. Because you really cant target many more then that per page anyhow. Not if we are talking about main keywords here. Brad
I can't really do it per page, as my main site is a forum and I can only put keywords on the home page. But there are tons of uses of the keywords within the forums, just not on the home page.
Well Brad is right... I also use 3-4 keywords per page... The keywords are so chosen that the anchor text contains all the keywords used... Well keywords tag doesn't mean much... it's the title tag and the description... the keyword tag just tells you what you are targetting... Take care Manish
are we talking of meta keywords here or meta descriptions. I think the question is about the allowed or standard meta keywords..
I dont mean to burst any bubble, but if google doesnt care about the keyword meta tags, than it doesnt matter how many keywords you use. Of course the more keywords you use in the meta tag just means a visitors browser would have to load them all, slowing down your site. Not by much though.
Use maximum 10 keywords. If you use many keywords like 20-30 then it would be treated as spammy, still not very sure about it. But its better to use few and relevant keywords.
Between 50-60, I never go over 60 because google doesn't like to see descriptions cut off on the search pages.