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Could you please tell me that what is the max length for Meta Keywords?

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They can be as long as the max time that you are willing to waste in filling them in. Meta keywords are useless! – Marco Demaio Aug 5 '11 at 17:23

9 Answers

up vote 14 down vote

FYI, meta keywords have no effect on SEO whatsoever.

There is no official length requirement but generally you'll see people mention anywhere from 100 to 255 characters. Just be sure to put in the words that match your page's content and don't worry about anything else.

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John is 100% correct for Google and Bing. It is possible other search engines use Meta Keywords but most likely not because of how easy it is to "stuff" or abuse the tag. – RandomBen Aug 3 '11 at 13:11
I recall hearing that Yahoo is the only company that actually looks at them, however that was before they licensed the Bing code, so in terms of search (i.e. Bing and Google) the keywords tag is a waste of time. In some CMS platforms they're used for internal searches however -- if say you're searching for a post on a topic – theonlylos Aug 3 '11 at 20:04
up vote 3 down vote

Meta Keywords doesn't make any improvements in SEO, use Meta Description instead.

Google says "Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years"

FYI, different search engines show different number of characters of meta description and title tags.

Ref: http://www.sagerock.com/blog/title-tag-meta-description-length/

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'Description insted' ?! - Keywords and Description have different purpose and it is not clear if Keywords have impact on SEO :) – dudelgrincen 2 days ago
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Anything you want, there is no limit.

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Correct, there is no limit. Bear in mind though, that increasing the letter count in your meta increases the code to text ratio, which DOES have an impact on SEO. I actually don't pay close attention to them, since their value to SEO is nill, but if I can generate the keywords automatically, I tend to keep it down to 100-160 characters max. – DKOATED Aug 4 '11 at 11:30
There is a limit. The search engines will stop reading them at some point. Even if it only is because the crawler reaches the max file size for the page. – John Conde♦ Aug 4 '11 at 12:05
up vote 0 down vote

<TITLE> - As shorter is better for your keywords. I use 3 - 6 words and separate them with "|".

Example:

<title>Keyword Phrase 1 | Keyword 2</title>

<DESCRIPTION>

Before I filled this meta with keywords and tried to make it interesting for users but now I leave this meta tag empty and it works not bed. I mean Search Engine generates the description automatically and yanks the best snippets.

<KEYWORDS>

I don't pay attention on it. I lost the value now.

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This is suboptimal. Up to 6 words separated might look spammy. And if you don't write the description = snippet yourself, you throw away the opportunity to catch a visitor with something handcrafted. – initall Oct 25 '12 at 11:22
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Please go to Youtube and search with "matt cutts meta keywords". See this Google webmaster page for some meta tags Google supports. The "keywords attribute" section here on wikipedia pretty nice sums up all there is to say about it.

In general: The most important search engines mostly ignore it, so don't waste time with it. As others noted, there is no official length limit, but if your keyword list has as much words as your main content it might look spammy ;-)

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I think the meta keywords should have a maximum length of 280 chars and a minimum of 100 chars.

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…and this is based on what? – Su' Sep 25 '12 at 7:23
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256 is the correct keywords length

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What source are you basing this information on? – paulmorriss Oct 15 '12 at 13:41
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The question coming in you mind is no longer make any seance.

Google and all other major search engine like Yahoo, Bing has disqualified Meta keyword tag log before.

So even if you adding meta keyword tag in you webpages Google and all other search engine never going to take look at that one and you never going to get any seo benefit out of it.

So it's better to concentrate on Title, Description, Body content of the webpage to make SEO work for you.

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up vote 0 down vote

7 to 8 general keywords with comma separated is good to put on all pages of your site.

Some peoples put huge list which is over optimization. Keywords must be related to your content or meta description.

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