I am using Site Designer Foundation 6.5.3. On the Page Manager is a box where you can insert keywords. CC's manual on this keyword box says, "keywords should be words or phrases that people use when searching for a site like yours....keywords in total should be no longer than 250 characters (including spaces) in length, should contain no repeated words or phrases, and could be comma delimited".

So is CC trying to advise that more than 250 characters is considered "keyword stuffing", something that Google does not like? If I exceed 250 characters, is this bad for SEO?

In other posts on this forum somebody wrote "Never use keywords in the meta tag that do not appear on the page, this is word spamming".

So if I use "coffee cup" as a keyword, than I must also make sure that "coffee cup" appears somewhere as text on the same page?

The domain name of the site then the pg title then page description then text on the pg, then alt text and image descriptions all contain words that can be put together to list as keywords that help search engine to better guide people to associate with the correct info pg and rank the site better because of its well structured SEO search engine optimization by using the optimum organizing of words in all sections of the site and pg to give the smallest fasted direction for them to find you and what they are looking for. Google is vague on this and does not come right out and say exactly what they are looking for. But when it says that certain things are bad then certainly steer clear of them. <meta name="keywords" content="coffeecup, software, forum, web design"> If you view source of this forum pg and go down the code list this is the line with meta keywords. seems there are 4 there coffeecup, software, forum, web design. Try to make it so that your keywords can be put together in sentences that the customers would ask and have it structured so that google bots can understand or interpret your site easily, then you will rank high and get lots of traffic. Sometimes it is trial and error till you find what works. Read the webmaster tools site from google all that they have to say about tweeking your site for good seo Submit pgs for indexing then fix all problems and feedback that they send of things that are wrong. I am no authority on this this is just what I seem to have picked up over the years. My sites seo is horrible and i am currently working on it. Yes if the site is fantastic looking and works perfectly it is kind of useless if it gets no traffic would think that the main topic of discussion here on the forums would be seo but it is little discussed here. I recently read the CC instructions on the page manager section too and after reading still did not know what to do exactly. But I do know that that is where to put in the keywords when you do that.

Why would you put the domain name of the site in keywords for SEO purposes?

People searching are not likely to put the domain name in a search because they would already know the name of the site in order to type it in,Similarly, it makes more sense then not to have the domain name as the H1 header (as many people
do) but make it the H2 or even H3 with the H! being assigned to something more relevant for SEO keywords,, for example

A client of mine who had a pizza joint in Melbourne Australia had his H1 title as his restaurant name (which also was the domain name too) he was getting reasonable SEO results but not fantastically good, on updating his site I changed the restaurant name to an H2 header and the H1 to "The Best Pizza In (the area of Melbourne)" this was included in the keywords, within a few days his site was up in the top 6, and within a few weeks consistently at N0 1, 2 or 3.
and funnily enough the Number 3 lot was the most productive (being as that is considered to be around the eye-level spot & one theory is that this position is preferred to the number 1 spot because that is what people see first.

SEO is a constant battle, using the SD keywords section that CC provides is great for a starting point, but needs constant updating as you tweak it in order to improve the results even changing 1 keyword or adding one, or changing the wording of the description etc, requires exporting the whole file again.

I have therefore got into the habit of not using that keyword section within SD itself, I now do my own keywords in my text editor (following guidelines on formatting etc) then when I export the SD project I copy & paste the keywords from the text editor to the exported project file before FTP.
that way I can keep updating keywords (description etc) in the text editor and simply copy into the already exported project file and FTP just the relevant page.

Sounds more complicated than it is, but it saves having to export the project file every time some changes are made to the keywords or description sections.

Thank you Wayan Jaya for your good information I guess that the rest of my post was OK? Can you have the name of your business or site at the top but put in in an h-3 tag? I have 3 h tags at the top of my home pg perhaps I could make the top one h3 and the second one h2 and the 3rd one h1? Or put a catchy call to action phrase in and make it h1. I am going to have around 20 pg's on the site, does each separate special subject pg need its own specific to it keywords list. Do the main heavy 1st rated or high rated words need to be put on all 20 pgs and get repeated 20 times, with then a few special ones on the separate pgs.? Yes there is plenty to wonder about with keywords.

GregB,

If your pages are about different things, which most of the time they will be, they should have their own set of keywords.

That way the pages can be indexed on their own giving you more results than just your website.

Thank you all for your insights.

Looks like SEO is going to be an extended, trial and error process.

I hate to contradict some previous comments but Google announced back in 2009 that Meta Keywords would no longer factor in your SEO ranking.

Why? Because web designers were abusing them by including the business' competitors names so if you searched for a competitor your website would come up as well in the results. Web designers knew most visitors would not be aware of the page source code so would not see that a competitor had been included in the keywords.

Google initially just changed their algorithm to ignore Meta Keywords and to pick up all keywords from the page content thinking that a website would not promote its competitors in full view on the page. But being the creative folk who flourish as web designers some worked out that by putting white text against a white background in a section well below the main content that visitors would not see them but they would be picked up by the Bots because they were on the page. Google got wise to this so changed their algorithm to compare the background colour to the font colour to prevent this. Next web designers started using slightly different colours so Google now sets Hex value parameters for background versus font colours. Finally website designers then tried different colours but with a tiny font, Google ignores that now as well by setting a minimum font size for indexing.

The ability to put them in the code is just a legacy from pre 2009, no harm in putting them there but makes no difference to your SEO. Some website SEO graders still incorrectly score for this. This is not to be confused with the page Meta Title and Meta Description, these do have a significant impact on your SEO as long as they are within the correct parameters for number of characters/spaces.

The way to get best SEO is with well written content incorporating all the keywords into both the headers and paragraphs. Also there is no harm in including them as a list in your Footer, especially if your services cover a number of locations (towns etc) which you could mention here. But be careful of keyword stuffing, as a general rule a single keyword should not exceed 5% of the pages written content. If you do list your services and towns you only have to have one list for each you don't need to do 'Web Designer in London', 'Web Designer in Brighton' etc Just put Web Designer once in the list of services and London, Brighton etc in the list of towns, the Bots will pair them up for SEO.