Meta keywords confusion: include none, 3, 5, 20?

[MarketingEnergy]

Over the last few months, I have come across a great variety of opinions on the use of meta keywords in the SEO plug ins or tools I fill out for customers. Some people and organizations advise to leave that field empty, others suggest to use maximum 3 keywords, but I have also heard 5 or maximum 20. I am quite confused about this? Does anyone know Google's latest opinion on this? And what about the other search engines Yahoo and Bing?

[MarketingEnergy]

Thanks Thomas for all the extra links. I will check them out later!

[DennisSeymour]

Dont bother with it. It's not really important. You can rank fine without them

You will find it confusing since most sites that are old and ranking will probably have them lol.

[KarlBantleman]

Hi,

As Thomas said in his first comment...your competitors (and I do this when researching for our clients) will use this when trying to see what keywords you are trying to compete for so I always leave it out. There are obviously other ways of seeing this so it's not going to mean they'll never know what you are targeting but it makes them work a bit harder to get the info.

In short...leave it out.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I want to be certain that were talking about the same thing here. Did you mean to say use them in your copy or your text that people would be able to see on your webpage?

If you meant only meta tag keywords please move on below the text however if you weren't keep reading the content and bold

If you were discussing using them on a webpage I'm sorry I mistook your comment for something else and here's some information that you may like.

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

** Authoritylabs.com as a free keyword checker which is quite fine as does SERPS.com**

You can use my favorite witches scribecontent.com as well it will show you a lot of metrics on how to weight your content the correct way

OR

Did you mean use meta keywords?

essentially if you meant meta keyword tags

you'll find these links are very helpful

http://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

http://marketing.grader.com/

the answer is you should have absolutely 0 listed on your website do not put them on their waste of time and they will  tell competitors. What you're trying to rank for here's some information on that subject. Along with 2 tools that will help you to generate helpful meta tags like your title tag or the most important if not the most important tag you can possibly choose. This will basically decide where your website ranks and if people click on or not. Very important to get right the others author is very popular now and helpful and do not forget your description which will tell your customers/people browsing the web looking for your site exactly what your site does and why they should go there you have to stick to a blank and these 2  tools will allow you to create the metadata tags correctly as always you do not fill-in the keyword tag unfortunately they all seem to still have this stupid thing as an option

The only search engine that looks at the keywords anymore is Microsoft's Bing – and they use it to help detect spam. To avoid hurting your site, your best option is to never add this tag.

_ from search engine land_

http://www.metatags.org/meta_tags_code_generator

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/meta-tag-generator/

below is information backing up why you should not use  keyword meta tags

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067564/How-To-Use-HTML-Meta-Tags

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_element

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/worthless-meta-tags-used-by-seo-companies/6099/

Respectfully,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

I would never use the keyword box simply for 2 big reasons the 1st one is all you're going to really do is ensure your competitors know what keywords you are trying to rank for that's it.

The 2nd Google has not used it since 2006 to rank anything.

So you're best off leaving the box empty and putting your keywords in your content sparingly and wisely. Check out scribecontent.com it will give you some good hints as to how to add content. And deal with keyword boxes.

I hope I have been of help,

Thomas