How Many Keywords you Should Use in Meta Tags
When people ask this question they are usually referring to the Meta Keywords Tag. There are several other Meta Tags where you should be inserting your keywords and keyword phrases as well, besides the Keyword Meta Tag.
Here is a rundown of the various meta tags where your main, target keyword should be inserted and how many times keywords should be inserted in these various Meta Tags. Proper use of keywords in the meta tags, as explained on this page, are the foundation and cornerstone to On Page SEO.
Keywords Meta Tag
You probably have read not to waste your time using the Meta Keywords Tag because search engines ignore them. How these supposed website search engine experts might know this I find questionable. I would use and insert the Keywords Meta Tag in your website or blogs pages for three reasons:
- These 'experts' might be wrong.
- The keywords meta tag is another legitimate opportunity to insert keywords.
- The rules of SEO might change tomorrow.
How Many Keywords in the Meta Keywords Tag?
Insert up to 5 keywords phrases keeping these rules in mind:
- If, when doing your keyword research, you come up with several keyword phrases that are very similar, use these as your Meta Keywords tag keywords. For example, when we were doing keyword research with Infinity Google Keywords for this page, the software gave use these two very similar search terms:
- how many keywords should I use in meta tag.
- how many keywords to put in meta tag.
So we used both these long tail keywords in the Meta Keywords Tag. You can check for yourself by right clicking this page and select 'view source' from the menu. All the Meta Tags can be found between the <head> and </head> tags near the top.
The resulting Meta Keywords Tag is ...
In doing your keyword research you do find more than one very similar long tail keyword phrase use up to five of these similar long tails.
- If, when doing your keyword research, you DO NOT come up with several keyword phrases that are very similar use the one, main, core, long tail keyword phrase once and then pieces of that main keywords phrase up to 4 times. For example, lets pretend your main target keyword phrase is how to do keyword research. The following would be the keywords you should use in the Keywords Meta Tag:
- how to do keyword research.
- how to keyword research.
- keyword research.
See how the main core keyword phrase comes first and then pieces of that keywords phrase come after. The resulting Keywords Meta Tag in this example would look like ...
Use of Keywords in Meta Tags in Wordpress
One of the very things I don't like about Wordpress is the lack of granular control. Attempting to directly control and craft your meta tags in Wordpress is a seriously daunting task and best left to a good plug in for this purpose. Do a search for Wordpress SEO plugin. Look for one that has the most positive reviews.