This tag lists the words or phrases that are descriptive of, and found within the contents of the page. This tag provides some additional text for crawler-based search engines. However because of frequent attempts to abuse their systems, most search engines now ignore this tag.
Note: Of all the major crawler-based search engines, only Inktomi currently supports the Keywords Meta tag.
Similar to the Meta Description tag, there is a limit to the number of captured characters within the Keywords Meta tag. Keep the tag to between 4 and 8 keywords or keyphrases, separated by commas.
Syntax: Keyword1,Keyword2,Keyword3,Keyword4
All keywords listed in the Keywords Meta Tag should appear at least once in your content (body), or they may be considered to be irrelevant spam. You should also avoid repetitions, to prevent penalization by the search engines for keyword “stuffing”. The most important keywords should be listed first, to increase their prominence for the search engines that still consider this tag in their determination of your pages’ rankings.
Side Note: Approximately a year ago, Yahoo was still considering the keywords meta tag. While that may have changed, it will do no harm to use this tag, provided you don’t abuse it.
Attention! If you are utilizing XHTML+RDFa (which is recommended), you should not use the keywords meta tag. Opt instead, for the implementation of “Common Tags”.
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SEO On-Page Optimization