how many meta keywords should I site have?
 

how about 30?. Does the description have to have keywords in aswell?

How many keywords is really a vague question.

What's far more important than meta is what text you have on the page. Optimizing with keyword meta really isn't going to do much unless you can write 200+ words of unique text.

Keywords should be based on what you have in your text. With sparse text, a few keywords is really all you have on a page anyway. |huh

ok thanks mate, any more views on this matter?

No worries. :)

Just noticed I missed your second question.

Description should read like understandable language, and should use words present in your body text. Using keywords is good, but making it readable is far more important.

150-200 chars seems to be about as much as you can get away with, though less really is more.

Meta keywords don't really have the punch like they used to have...I include them but don't overstress it too much as there are more important areas to focus on. I don't use too many keywords though and also try to hit a certain keyword density throughout my SEO pages.

wow thanks guys, so content and text on the actully bonus here. thats the vibe im getting from your two posts.

Should the keywords be different per page, take a look at http://www.foxyreviews.co.uk Per different model Should I use different keywords or stick with the same for all my pages. Likewise the descirption of the page

As I saw quite a big site have the same page description and keywords for all its pages and found this just a tad strange.

Keywords should be relevant to each page. Each page should be as unique as possible.

If you can manage to have a blanket set of keywords that's fits perfectly over an entire site, yet still have lots and lots of unique text, then you should sell your skills as a SEO copyrighter. |thumb

thanks virgo I will make them all different

From what I hear from SEO professionals, it is best to optimize for only a handful of keywords. So you may only need 4-5 entries in your META Keywords. Remember, you can repeat a keyword 3 times without getting penalized...

Repeated where? In the metas or on the page?

In context, it seems like he's talking about meta-keywords.

In my experience, there are more factors to balance than simply the number, like 3. |huh

Yes, I believe it would be a true rarity that you'd find someone who is "in the know" who would toss out a number like that. Firstly, the number is bullshit. Secondy, what penatly? Don't tell me that I'm going to get penalized unless you know what the penalty is. Thirdly, I'd bet that a lot of people here have keyword phrases in their metas that repeat the same keyword numerous times. I know I do. Yet, for some stranger reason, my pages get listed. I guess 3 isn't the golden number.

Most keywords are ignored by the major SE's. They make up their own based on the content of the page. ie:
"Useless Warrior gives his mustache a trim while he rides his mower to scare beavers". Could get a hit for the search “UW gives mustache rides to beavers”.
The more keywords you can use in your content the better the results.
It has to be done in sentences that make some kind of sense not just one word repeated hundreds of times.

In other words, it's not really a keyword unless it's found within the content of the page. Otherwise, it's just a waste of space found within the keyword meta tag. |shake|

Lots of people run around saying things like this and as usual it is a total crock of shit...

.. again, I would like to see one iota of proof behind these statements!



Meta tags, including keywords, and descriptions, are fundamental parts of any 'html' page..

Nobody knows what SE's do with meta tags, unless they work for 'that' search engine.. and I swear no one that ever promoted this theory was a Google employee.

DD

While the meta tags are part of a html page how they are used by the search engines varies.
When you look at your serps in different SE's you might see your meta description in one and parts of the content of the page in another.
In the early days everyone put sex or porn in the meta tags just so you would show up in the serps (even mainstream sites used this trick). You could search for "sex" and windup looking at a blender.
It doesn't take a bunch of brains to figure out how people were getting their sites to the top of the serps by using keywords that had nothing to do with their page. If the keywords have nothing to do with your content, do you think the SE's will let you be in the top 50. just on the keywords you supplied? You can put "Paris Hilton" in your meta tags as much as you like and the chances of your coming up in the serps IF you have no "Paris Hilton" content will be slim! Unless you're going to use Urie's search engine in Lower Slabovia.
Here is a chart that shows what SE's use: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167891

Even if you worked for Google, or Yahoo, they section people off into "The Crawl team", "The indexing team", "The Algo Team", "The spam team", "The Adwords team", or whatever, so you might work for Google as part of the Spam Team for 20 years and not have a clue how Google ranks pages.

DangerDave,

MY OPINION:

Four months ago, Yahoo treated keywords in titles almost as well as it did keywords in the TITLE tag. Today, both keywords embedded in META keyword/description tags carry about the same amount of ranking boost. However, that boost is on par with one you'd get if you stuffed an H1 with keywords and shoved it on the bottom of the page - in other words, minimal. The on-page optimization that is most effective with Yahoo right now is high keyword density.

Both Google and MSN ignore meta tags in terms of ranking. I've tested it. However, not having META descriptions on your site may result in serious indexing problems with Google that may last over a year to resolve.

Part of Google's duplicate content filter *seems* to use similar description snippets (whether it be from META tags or on page text) as one factor and a site with messy HTML structure that also lacks a META description tag may get the wrong snippet crawled (e.g. navigation text) and in the end wind up largely supplemental. I've seen some sites with clean HTML structure have no problems with this, but if you don't know how Google constructs description snippets, you are taking a chance by not using unqiue meta description tags on every page.

BTW, that SEW chart is dated December 5, 2002. SE Algorithms change by the day.

http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html

Straight from the mouth of a Google employee.