Click On This Image
Click on this image, which I’ve edited to do my best to anonymise it, to see the big picture of the longest meta keywords tag I have seen to date.
It is 2,843 characters long. No, newbies, I did NOT count them – thanks to Microsoft Excel’s @Len function. Yes, two thousand, eight hundred and forty-three characters long. That’s nearly 4 times as long as the 735 characters I recommended (in point 6.) here to guarantee that you win the race to the bottom of the search engine results.
So, how long should meta keywords tags be?
0. Yes, zero characters, probably.
That’s mainly because, as far as Google is concerned, meta keywords tags are irrelevant in deciding which websites to show in their results.
It is conceivable that there may be some very minor (at best) benefits of having the keywords tag present but, if you do use it, use it sparingly and make it meaningful.
I just hope this meta keywords tag wasn’t created by an SEO consultant!
Have you seen a meta keywords tag even longer than this? If so, leave details in your comment below. We’ll check it, before removing any references to the website in question, and publish only the character count in your edited comment.
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