Meta Keywords | The DO's and DON'Ts

I just wanted to know how best to choose keywords for the META tag.

If, for instance, we are talking about an accommodation guide to Cape Town, you would choose all the relevant keywords. So I went to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox and searched for "cape town accommodation". What I got was this list:

accommodation in cape town
cape town accommodation
accommodation cape town
catering accommodation cape town
self catering accommodation cape town
holiday accommodation cape town
cape town self catering accommodation
holiday accommodation in cape town
accommodation cape town south
accommodation cape town south africa

I would like to ask you guys if putting all these keywords in would be better than putting in a few?

Can you put too many keywords?

I would like to optimize my site (capeaccommodation.za.org) for SE like Yahoo and MSN as my PR is only 3 (but climbing).

Any suggestions.

keywords for the META carry such little weight only mis-spellings may show.

Take a look at this article:
http://www.highrankings.com/metakeyword.htm

Personally, I'd say focus on your title tag and your copy. Use your keywords when writing your conent, in other words.

It's always a good idea to pay attention to the keywords, it only takes a couple of minutes...take this in mind: try not to exceed the 1000 characters limit when placing the keywords in the metatag and start your first keyword with a capital letter.

When doing this you are doing all you can and you did the right thing consulting the adwords feature.

do a search on the high ranking google sites, most do not have keywords or descriptions..

odd really

Dankie vir al dit!

I see what you people mean when you say that the "title tag" is the most important one.

Using MSN.com, I searched for "car rental south africa". The top spot was taken by a site whose title tag was:

Car Hire South Africa, Car Rental South Africa - Car Rental


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So then I searched for "cape town accommodation". This is the one that I am interested in the most. I (capeaccommodation.za.org) am currently placed #10 on MSN.com

So I have changed my title tag to:

Cape Town Accommodation Guide // Find Accommodation in Cape Town


Lets hope this will do better.

"do a search on the high ranking google sites, most do not have keywords or descriptions.. " This is because google weights incoming links so heavily. You can good rankings with no content at all and just good incoming links.

I also would not use 1000 characters in the keyword tag. If you have a page and it's optimized for 1000 characters of keywords you are never going to rank for anything worth ranking for. The keywords will be so diluted that you will have no relevance.

Just put your title tag as the keywords and you should be fine.....the title will reflect what the page is about and the keywords should reflect what the title says.....meld the two in to the description and you're on your way!

The description is often used NOT at all for ranking but for the description text in the results page (SERPs).

"The description is often used NOT at all for ranking but for the description text in the results page (SERPs)" ..yahoo is very fond of the description tag. A well written one can be the difference between page one and page ten.

From a users standpoint it is important to have a good description since, as mentioned above, it may show as part of your search results listing. So if you write it properly it will be the hook that makes a surfer click your listing vs. the one above or below you.

Not to mention once you run up against other sites that are well optimized you are going to have to leverage every possible optimization area on your site to compete.

Most of them have very very powerful backlinks and have reps working with them personally at the major search engines or companies like overture.

This is a great tool to help find the best keywords for your site:
http://www.sonnarinternet.com/kw

Hello,
You can have a lot of keywords but make sure that they are very very appropriate to your site and your keywords should be there in the site. If you have a lot, make sure that your top keywords are the first few. I would also recommend you to not repeat keywords too many times and have Accomodation in Cape Town in Description will have a better impact.

~ CC