Length of Meta-Tag

Hi,

i'm new to seo, and I'm just wondering about the optimum length of meta-tags.

See for example the tag below; there would be much more related words (not to mention misspellings...), but I'm not sure if google would like it.

Does anyone has some experiance with this?

Thx & Reagards,

Lukasz


<meta name="keywords" content=" HipHop, Funwear, Rap, shirt, T-Shirt, tshirts, t shirt druck, t shirt bedruck, shirt, Sweatshirt,sweatshirt,sweater drucken Shirt, Kapuze, shirtshop,
merchandising, Textildruck, kostenlosen, shop, online-shop, on demand, webshop, bedrucken, verkaufen, mauspads, fanartikel, Geld verdienen, T-Shirt, Print, Textilprint, Offsetdruck,Flockdruck, spreadshirt, vstylish, krass, fett, selber machen, Cap,cap,Druck,druck,individuell bedrucken,Aufdruck, geschenkidee, Girlie-Shirt, dj, Fan, Bekleidung, Kaufen,
drucken, Bedrucken">

If you add to pages -- keep:

meta keywords down to five words of information precisely on the page.

Even those your overall site topic might be t-shirts if the page itself is about sweatshirts the n T-shirt on the page in Meta Kyword is a waste.

e.g.

meta name="keywords" content="T-Shirt tshirts t shirt druck bedruck shirts"> would be good on a page about "t-shirts".

Please bear in mind that Meta Keyword is deprecated, or in plain language -- "useless".

Meta Tag is the most importantn factor in SEO, Meta Tag shoule be related to your site business or motive, the length of Meta Tag should be Title Tag (75 Chr), Description should be related to site page contant and not more than longer (255 chr), Keywords Tag not have keywords stuffing and not longer than 200 - 300 chr.

fathom, raj_friend,

thank you for your responses.
an other source gave me the hint to use "hello engines" do determine and optimal meta tag lenght.


based on your answers and some other research i'll try the following strategy:

- use google adwords as analysing tool to determine the most important key words for my site (keyword pi within

google times clickrate). i'll pick the 4-6 most important ones


- include these keywords into the title tag
- keep meta_keyword tag down to these few critical key words.
fathom, how you came up with the number 5?
- include these keywords into the content in the following way:
- <h1> contains 3 or 4 of the critical kw
- in the text below these words will be mentioned again, when possible they will be links, linking to

pages within the site. a page linked to will be optimized for just the word that triggered the link.

- if available, i'll link the site from other sites with a high page rank for the critical words
- i'll also link TO other sites that have relevance in the identified words.

- when done i'll submit the site to google, DMOZ and a bunch of other directories, and than i'll just wait...
WWWWWUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAHA, WUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
(^^ this is some mad laughter as you might know it from various evil movie and comic charackters ;)

- the site i'm currently working on alas is already submitted to google.
in the future i'll submit only after optimization and linking is complete, since it is said to take longer for

google to update existing sites compared to list new ones.

If meta tags aren't that important anymore, should I even bother adding them? My site doesn't have ANY.

Also, what do I do if I have a service that people would search for under two different words that mean the same thing? For example, student and pupil? I want to keep the site consistent and use the same word, but then what about all the people who might be searching using the other word? I was thinking I could add the other word into my meta tags, but don't want to make a mess of things.

Any suggestions?

The Title tag and meta description tag are the most important ones. The meta keyword tag is just a bonus one that may/may not help in any way.

If you try and cater for ALL your potential viewers you may end up diluting the relevance of your site. Concentrate on ONE theme (which ever you decide) and add any related words as a secondary importance in your copy (in context)

Easiest way to find out what keyword to use is to simply search for it and see the # of results. "Student" has 168,000,000 results and "pupil" has 4,900,000. What this means is that "student" is a common word and people use it more often which equals more searches for that word. "pupil" less popular and you'll be mixed in with all the Apt. Pupil movie reviews, trailers, pictures and fan site.

I say dont just target "student" because you wont rank well. Be very specific as to what your targeting. ex: college student, HS student, student books, etc.

BTW title is very important so make sure you research your word very carefully. and just use the "description" META as that is what users will see as your google description. dont waste time on the others.

-PK

Meta tags are not the most important factor. Indeed, they are pretty much worthless.

High rankings are the result of page titles, page copy, and anchor text of inbound links; mostly anchor text of IBL's.

The Title tag and the meta description tag ARE important.
This is true also.

meta desc is muchly depresiated "see fathoms def" but the Title is still huge, use page theming ie: IBL match Title match H1 Match density match onpage anchor match match image optimization etc

With regards to the description tag I think that Inktomi uses it for relevancy and human edited directories use them to help uderstand the site. Either way, it only takes a short amount of time and a little bit of thought to write a good description so why not?

On another issue:
Here's some guidelines that Google states:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html