I'm renovating my site for SEO purposes, and I'm wondering which is better to use for keywords in my meta tags: more individual words, or more phrases? For instance, I've always put this in for my website:

<meta name="keywords" content="hogwarts rpg,harry potter rpg,hogwarts role playing,harry potter role playing"/>

But I did a search on Google for sites like mine, and one of my competitors does it differently, like so:

<meta name="keywords" content="hogwarts,harry potter,rpg,role playing"/>

Which is better?

*Almost* no search engine uses keywords, because they are easy to use for spamdexing. The only one I can name off hand is AltaVista.

Don't worry about using them. Instead, use a good description (which search engines DO use) and a good title.

*Almost* no search engine uses keywords, because they are easy to use for spamdexing. The only one I can name off hand is AltaVista.

Don't worry about using them. Instead, use a good description (which search engines DO use) and a good title.

This.

Google (which is pretty much the only engine you need to worry about) indexes by page content and link references. Use a decent but short description (a couple sentences work well) that gets the point across fast - I don't spend my time reading each site description as I scroll down Google.

Well, Google is who I'm most concerned about, but I would like to include meta keywords for those that do still use it. And I have found yet another query :p


<meta name="keywords" content="harry potter hogwarts online rpg role playing game games"/>


vs.

<meta name="keywords" content="harry potter rpg,hogwarts rpg,harry potter role playing game,hogwarts online,hogwarts online rpg,harry potter online rpg"/>
<!-- AND ETC. -->


Someone told me it was best not to separate your keywords with commas. They told me that commas separate everything into unique search phrases, whereas the first example would allow different search phrases to be formed by itself. Is that true?