When it comes to search engines and your meta tags, is it better to have only a select few keywords, or is it better to have as many keywords relating to your site as possible?

I just used Google's AdWords keyword generator and there are TONS os results, a lot of them similar to eachother only with slight modifications. I'm tempted to use all of them in hopes that I can generate more search engine traffic, and since Google gave me those keywords, I would hope they would find them relevent.

So, is it better to use as many keywords as you can think of, or will you get penalized for having too many?

When it comes to search engines and your meta tags, is it better to have only a select few keywords, or is it better to have as many keywords relating to your site as possible?

Select a few keywords.. but choose targeted as much as you can. example.. rather than car rental service you can choose car rental service california etc... read this one > http://www.wordtracker.com/keyword-research-guide.pdf

I'm not entirely sure what question you're asking. If you're asking should you try to optimize a web page for as many keyords as possible then the answer is no. Too many keywords on a page will more than likely just end up competing with each other and dilluting the optimization of any of them.

Also meta tags aren't going to do much at all to improve where your pages rank in a search engine. Many SEOs don't use the meta keywords at all. If you're going to use them it's best to just use phrase that appear on the page itself. Adding extras could be seen as spam.

If you're asking though about which keywords to bid on in AdWords then you might want to target more. it will probably be best to try some and see which have the greatest ROI and to drop the ads for the phrases that don't perfom well. Keep testing out new phrases and use as many as give you a good return on your investment.

imo, the title tag is the only one that matters and the fewer and more targeted the keyword phrases, the better.

Great, thanks for the suggestions.

Just to clear the question up a little, I was referring to meta keywords and whether or not having a lot will be frowned upon by search engines.

Thanks again

I had a feeling that's what you were asking, but I thought I'd ask just in case. I have been known to be wrong before.

In general the meta keywords tag isn't going to do much of anything to help your site as far as ranking is concerned, but if you try to stuff too many keywords in you may get flagged as trying to spam the search eninges.

As far as meta tags are concerned. I think they matter in this order:

<title> very important: shows up in the search engine results
<meta description ..> pretty important: often shows up in the SERPs also
<meta keyword ...> not very important: there's no concensus on how many you should use. 1-4 usually?

As a reference, you could type in your main keywords in Google, look at the meta tags of the sites that come up on the first page - view source...

That should give you an idea of what works. Every site is different. But you'll see that often times it's the off-page factors that matter most - ie. incoming links.

I wouldn't worry too much about meta keyword values...

Hope that helps.
-Jeffery

Meta keywords won't help you if you are concerned about Google index ranking. You are very likely to be listed in the first page of Google search index with "nuttychipmunk", though. As far as I know there is only one way of getting good ranking with keywords. You need to search the search engines for your favourite keyword like "funny" and then try to exchange links with as many "funny" word related sites as you can. By the way, you shouldn't use the same meta keyword more than 3 times. You've used "funny" way too many times in keywords meta. But I was told meta tags for keywords and pretty much everything are dead and they definitely won't affect google ads on your site.

Pretty much my view as well Jeffrey. Just a bit of semantics though. Technically the page title isn't a meta tag. It's often grouped together with meta tags when discussing seo, but still not a meta tag itself. I agree completely though about it's importance.

Frofi I wouldn't say exchanging links is the one way to go. In fact Google will more than likely place more weight on a one way inbound link than any link where you are also linking back. As long as the link exchanges with sites related to your site as in your example it's fine to exchange links. Be careful though when exchanging links with unrelated sites. Still one way inbound links (IBLs) from quality related sites are going to be best.