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Referring to Meta Tags, How Much Is Too Much? By Jill Whalen - December 07, 2000 (From the Rank Write Roundtable Newsletter) ~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~ From: Endeavors Online Rank Write is a great newsletter. I have been with you since issue #3. I have learned so much and hope I am putting it to good use. An automatic evaluator of my site said my title is too long at 67 characters and I believe you have pointed out that 60 is the best length. It also said that I have a serious problem with my Meta Keyword Tag length at 1050 characters and if not fixed immediately severe ranking problems may occur. Referring to Meta Tags, how much is too much and a problem? What is the ideal length? Regarding the Keyword Utilization in the Body HTML, it said that the serious problem with the Meta Keywords Tag makes it so that the Body will not be analyzed. Is this correct? Margaret E. Booth Endeavors Online www.techselections.com ~~~Jill's Response~~~ Margaret, I definitely wasn't the one who said anything about title length being best at 60 characters! As many of you know, I don't approach search engine optimization as a numbers game. If I did, I'd be walking around here with a headache all day! I believe in making all of my tags an appropriate length for what I need to get into them. This varies from page to page and site to site. I can't think of a time when I've EVER counted the characters in any tag I've created. If, however, you are a numbers fan, from what I understand, most of today's search engines will display 60 to 115 characters of your title tag. Remember, though, this doesn't mean that if you make it shorter or longer than those amounts, you'll be penalized. The same thing goes for the other Meta tags. Generally, most engines will index approximately 200 characters of the Meta description tag and about 1000 characters of the Meta keyword tag. (By the way, these numbers were obtained from www.searchenginewatch.com.) The problem with Meta tag analyzers such as what you used on your page, is that all they can do is look at tag length and the like. This really doesn't tell you anything, and isn't very helpful, for the most part. You could have "perfect" length tags, but be targeting the wrong keywords. You could have tags that THEY say are too long, but you feel are the right length for your needs. Most of what they tell you will have nothing to do with how you will actually rank in the engines, because they are using the most simplistic of views. If you can spend an hour or so and read a few of my most important articles, you will have a better feel for what you should put in all of these tags. The key articles for this discussion would be the Title Tag article, the Meta Description article, and the Meta Keyword Tag article. All of these can be found in our Rank Write articles section at: [ http://www.rankwrite.com/articles.htm ]. As to your last question about the problem with the keyword tag making it so that your body text could not be analyzed -- I'm not exactly sure what they were referring to. It might have meant that this particular tool could not analyze the body text because they didn't understand what keywords you were trying to target. But whatever it meant, it had nothing to do with the search engines actually reading your body text. Whether or not you use a Meta keyword tag correctly will not effect the engines' reading your body text. Think of the Meta keyword tag as a "guide" for the spider. It tells the spider what YOU as the Webmaster feel is important about this page. The spider will look through the body text itself and decide if your chosen keywords really are important or not. Spiders are fairly sophisticated these days. It doesn't work to tell the spiders that particular words are important just by using them in your Meta keyword tag. If these same words are not used in the body text itself, then the spider will simply shake its little spidey head and decide for itself what is important. This is why it's so crucial to match your Meta tags with the actual text on the page. In fact, it's the fundamental basis to a successful search engine optimization, and high rankings. - Jill ~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~ If you have questions about online copywriting or search engine optimization (or both!), just zip us an email to questions@rankwrite.com. We've had some folks ask if their question was "too basic" to be printed - and you don't have to worry about that! There are no "stupid" search engine optimization or copywriting questions, so ask away!