Use of keywords meta on a web page

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This meta tag is widely abused and stuffed with text to try and mislead the search engines, so it is advisable either just to use it sensibly or not at all.  There must be some search engines that still use it as a guide as to what the page is about, as also there must be many web sites that use the field for what it was intended.

My guesses as to how search engines read and interpret the meta keywords are as follows:

a) They count the number of words and include this count in the page total, thus diluting the body text and marking down a bit those that put many tens of spurious words in the keywords field,

b) They look for spamming (repeated) words in the meta keywords field and mark you down a bit accordingly,

c) They look for keywords that are not in the body text and if these exceed some proportion of the total, again mark you down a bit,

d) They ignore the words as far as page relevance matching is concerned (well known).

My advice would be to use no more than 7 meta keywords, all extracted from the body text.

If a search engine uses the meta keywords, remember that the fewer meta keywords there are, the more value can be attributed to each one.

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Started 9 June 2004, last amended 8 June 2008