meta tags

I was wondering if anyone has any good suggestions on the length of
title,description,keyword tags for google and yahoo.

If your keywords are very competitive, i.e., a service in a world famous area which results in perhaps millions of SE results then your page title needs to be quite short (2 – 3 words) and if applicable to your service better results may be obtained with geo targeting specific areas. Better results are obtained if you can ensure your page title is repeated several times in your body copy, but ensure you don’t go over the top, i.e., make sure your prose still reads naturally. Use the keyword suggestion tool at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/. Where key phrases are very competitive don’t necessarily choose the first suggested key phrases as initially you will have more success with phrases someway down the list, which return less results in search engines.

The description which is sometimes returned in search engine results needs to be a marketing “call to action” to encourage click-throughs. Any more than about 24 words will be cut short if the description is used in the search engine results.

Whilst Meta keywords these days apparently carry little weight, I still advise using them, as obviously they can’t harm. The following article contains words from Google which may throw some light on Google’s recent (April 2004) thinking on Meta keywords.

http://www.netmag.co.uk/features/default.asp?pagetypeid=2&articleid=30948&subsectionid=511&subsubsectionid=220

Very importantly, however, also work on lots and lots of keyword rich text throughout your site and get lots and lots of back-links, both will eventually rank you higher in Google and other important search engines.

I'm not sure about the "they can't harm" bit. Words in meta tag KEYWORDS easily tell search engines: "here are the terms I want to rank for", and a search engine could use this information to tweak some anti-keywordstuffing analysys.

So I would advice to avoid any keyword stuffing in meta tag KEYWORDS, also providing not just the top keywords but "collateral" terms or keyphrases too.

Whenever I am creating a page I normally pass it through this META tool: http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/meta-check.html. It is a good guide of length, etc. It's a good double check. I only use the free version.

I agree with LowLevel and for this reason I still change meta keywords whenever copy changes. That way the meta keywords are strictly in compliance with what is actually on the page.