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A Cre8asite Forums member asks the community about the length of a meta tag (keywords, description). Is there a particular length that you should limit yourself to?
Most search engines ignore it, and a recent lawsuit said that meta tags are immaterial. Still, a few people limit their meta tags to about 60 characters, like forum member EGOL.
Ammon Johns says something interesting regarding the length. His ideal meta tag size: zero. Why? You don't get credit and people steal it.
Seriously, there's a teeny advantage to not including the tag at all (leaner page, less data transfer), and a bigger disadvantage to having the tag in there (competitors mine it - half the keyword discovery tools use the keywords meta of other sites that rank well). Google doesn't give you any credit, not even a consolatory smile, for having the tag.
Kim Krause Berg doesn't use it and Barry Welford says that Yahoo will use meta keyword information for optimizing misspellings (but otherwise completely agrees with Ammon). There's more discussion as well, so hop on over to Cre8asite Forums for more.
Comments:
Mark
06/12/2008 02:20 pm
You must look at your keyword density. Then you will know what words to put in there and how many.
Eddie O'Mahony
06/13/2008 03:20 pm
I have never come across so much contradictory views on the subject SEO. I would like to know are meta tags useful or not Regards Eddie
Eddie O'Mahony
06/13/2008 04:00 pm
I have never come across so many contradictory views relating to SEO. Should I or should I not use meta tags? Regards Eddie
Scott Salwolke
06/13/2008 05:43 pm
I still think the meta tag has some use. It still shows up in the description for some search engines. And these snippet can influence whether prospects click on a link.
Kazuyoshi Tlacaelel
02/11/2009 12:46 am
I agree that google does not fully rely on metas as the web used to be, but google does indeed read them and uses them for displaying your page results. amongst other things. feb 2009. The tag is not useless, is just a delicate tunning that I believe is not so bad.
Joomla Expert
08/12/2009 07:48 am
There are only recommendations on the length of meta tags. But recommendations are - For tittle - about 65 characters for Description - about 150 - 200 characters for keywords - 256 characters