I've heard that if you have say 100 characters in your keywords this is bad for search engines?

Question

Any thoughts? on head tags in general linke descriptions/keywords etc, is there an issue or guide line on how many characters you use?

Answer 1

There is a guide which you be able to find by searching through http://www.webmasterworld.com. I dont think its 100 chars tho -> more like 220. The other thing to rmemeber is that not all search engines use the meta tags (google doesnt)

Answer 2

Internet Search Engines go to web pages with a program called a spider. The spider searches for key words on the page, and it searches from the top of the page down. So the more keywords you have the longer it will take the spider to search. Every spider has its limits, it doesn't waste its time searching the entire web page, hence the reason for keywords.

How many words a spider will search through, and its other rules vary with the search engine and are trade secrets, so I can't tell you if you can use 100+ characters safely, and for what search engine.

The short answer is: the more keywords you have on your web page the more likely the spider is stop scanning and go look somewhere else. But, the keywords are important clues to a spider, and on of the first things they look for. Therefore you can use 100 characters or more, just make sure that the more important keywords are first.

Answer 3

I will try to directly answer the question (some people are giving more info but it doesn't seem directly related to the question)

For keywords and descriptions (meta tags) they are pretty useless for ranking. Google might look at them but they are ignored a lot now-a-days. Yahoo or ask.com might pay a little more attention but again pretty useless.

The descriptions although ignored by ranking do show up on a search engine as the description of your site so it's good to have them.

Having them keyword rich improves the "information sent" for users.

For title tags, usually it's about 100 characters for google and a few more for yahoo, if you have more it's not going to hurt you, the extra characters will just get ignored.

Here is a good resource specifically about meta tags:


Meta Tag Optimization
http://www.rankquest.com/seotips/2005/10/meta-tag-optimization.html
* Meta Tag Optimization - An Introduction
* Meta Tags - The Myths.
* Optimizing the Description Tag
* Optimizing the Keyword Tag

Answer 4

Keywords are actually meta data. Some search engines get the performance by using meta data searches.
Google became the top dog by touting its performance based on meta data searches. A good bit of engines today index from meta data.

Getting the meta data inserted into the correct engine database is the real key.

www.webcrawler.com was the first search engine. The one big advantage that they had for the longest was, news group searching. This is were people used to really put all the info at. These were text parse searches and that is why meta data, keyword type searches became so needed.

If you look at my resume page source you will see the meta data keywords, when a search engine that uses meta data parses this page, it extracts these keywords into its index.

As far as 100 characters, most mainstream search engine databases have Fields much longer than 100 4byte characters (4byte = Unicode Chr Set)

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

Google DOES pay attention to your meta tags. They are not as valuable as they used to be, but they still need to be in place and done properly. Every little bit helps.

So you need to make sure your keywords are used in the body of the text on that page. If you list keywords in your meta field and they cannot be found on the web page you will get "negative points" from most search engines.

Generally we like to keep the total number of keywords in the head tags to 10 or less.

If you are looking for more niche keywords to use on your site try: http://www.instantkeywordresearch.com

Answer 6

You need to find out about optimization! See this website. It is for a program called web ceo. It explains how search engines work and how to get your site recognized and increase your ranking by them. I just got on Google by using it.

It is free to download and even if you don't upgrade it has tons of useful info!

GOOD LUCK!
http://www.webceo.com/cgi-bin/go/clickthru.cgi?id=Ryoell

Answer 7

point blank d more charaters the less results, try using quotes, the search engine searches for the exact string, which counts pretty much like a word(but actuall a string,of words,)

Answer 8

Just use key words.
Don't use words like the, it and, of, to, etc. They're too common and will appear in every single site.