Lets say I have a hog farm in Vermont. I might use 3 keywords to start. hog, hogs,vermont.
The queston is will the search engines put keywords together? IE. Do I need to have hog,hogs,vermont,vermont hogs,vermont hog,hogs vermont,hog vermont If the user types in vermont hogs and I only have hog,hogs,vermont will it find me?
Do I need to have the other 4 two word keywords or am I wasting keyword space?
If I want to reach users in the surrounding states do I just need to put those state names in or do I have put another list of two word keywords?
Search engines don’t use your meta keywords tag in the first place. It’s a relic from the 90s that people only still write “because it can’t hurt”.
The search engine is going to look at the title of your page, the text on your page, the anchor text of links pointing to your page, and the text surrounding links pointing to your page to determine what it’s about.
Yes they do, but not because they’re in your keywords meta tag.
If I do a search on Google for hogs in vermont then Google will return any page that has any or all of those words in any order and with anything in between them, somewhere on the page.
How it ranks the pages that return is a completely different matter and you’re not going to rank well just because you use those words on your page (unless hardly anyone else is using them). The trick is to figure out what phrases or words people who might do a search for your service might use to find you and use those on your page.
Why don’t you read the FAQs, it’s bit hard to describe SEO in it’s entirety in a few paragraphs.