The 71/160 BYTES sounds right to me, but as to keywords I’ve found that Google (or other search engines) ignoring them isn’t ENTIRELY true. They are ignored if they are not present in the BODY as plaintext; which is consistent with the entire POINT of the keywords meta: Listing words from the body text that are significant/important. That’s where 99% of people trying to use Keywords screwed up originally is stuffing them full of words that aren’t even present on the page in hopes of magically ranking on them – which flat out is NOT what the Keywords meta is FOR.
If you check the SEO analysis tool over at SEO Workers – which admittedly is a bit dated:
http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html
You’ll find they say that 8 or nine WORDS for keywords is ideal, and I suggest staying under 120 characters if possible. Notice that in their analysis they list relevance of the title, description AND keywords meta’s to the textnodes on the page. It’s funny how Google have been claiming that they aren’t counted anymore for about seven years now, when in testing, well…
… and lands sake, it’s called “keyWORDS”, not keyphrases, not keysentences, key-fracking-WORDS. Think of it like a word jumble – you’ll often see idioticies like this:
content=“Free Pascal Code, Free Pascal Tutorials, Free Pascal Guides, Free Pascal Examples, Example Code, SDL Example, SDL Tutorials, OpenGL Tutorials”
Again, it’s called keyWORDS, so used ‘properly’ this is just as functional:
content=“Free Pascal,Code,Tutorials,Guides,Examples,SDL,OpenGL”
… and last time I tested (about three years ago) they were only ignored under certain conditions – if you had more than ten items, if you had more than 120 characters, and if they have zero relevance to the actual SHOCK content on the page.
But if they exist on the page, you select just 8 or so of them, and use single words (or the occasional two word phrase when the single word isn’t relevant – see “Free Pascal” above because it’s the title of a compiler) it still provides a little more juice to those words than it would without. After all, that’s what it’s supposed to be for. You stuff it with two dozen “perfect match” phrases that don’t even exist in your content, OF COURSE IT’S GOING TO BE IGNORED.
Oh, and it’s supposed to be a comma delimited list – I’ve been seeing people using vertical breaks, no delimiters at all, colons, semi-colons, periods… Where the devil people came up with that being how it’s used is beyond me; Not long ago I saw someone trying to defend not only using verticle breaks (which he insisted on calling a ‘pipe’ character, which is wrong unless you’re in a *nix shell), but was stuffing the same values into BOTH keywords and description – NEITHER being valid use of said tags…
Even if keywords were truly ignored, following the simple rules (like those SEOWorkers suggests) makes it less than a eigth of a K on average, so where’s the harm in including it and SHOCK using it properly. (the same thing I say about the HTML4/XHTML1 header stuff the 5 lip-service tries to do away with)… more people use it properly within a narrow and hard to abuse set of rules, they might start paying attention to it again. Honestly, search engines could use the keywords meta and say they do so publicly if they just SHOCK CLEARLY DECLARED HOW TO USE IT… but of course nobody likes rules much less following them, which is why people just sleaze out HTML 3.2 and slap a 4 tranny or 5 lip service on it… Go bleeding edge of 1998 coding methodologies.
The description meta sees similar misuse since it does NOT exist for SEO purposes in terms of your ranking – anything you do with it for that purpose is abusing the tag. It exists to be the text shown on the SERP below your TITLE. As such it’s best to use a natural language paragraph describing what the site is for/about. Same goes for TITLE, which exists to be the title shown on a title bar for a window, on the taskbar, and has become what’s listed on the SERP as the text for the link to your page. It should NOT be treated as a content element as not all user agents show (or are required to show) it (see print, screen readers, etc).
Again, these are incredibly simple elements that I’m honestly flabberghasted to see the convoluted messes people turn them into.
