Accordling to SEO legend, this tag is no longer used by most search engines. In the “olden days” it was possible to shoot straight to the No.1 position for almost any keyword/phrase just by stuffing it into the keyword meta-tag. So that’s what people did… The SE’s responded to this “spamming” approach by either skipping or de-emphasising the contents of the tag.
I still think it is a useful discipline to insert the targeted keyword phrases for the page into the tag – as a reminder of what you are attempting to define about tthe page, if nothing else.
However, I also observed an interesting Google ranking result on a client’s site recently, where the Home page ranked surprising highly for several keywords that existed only in the keyword meta-tag. E.g. one of these keywords was “MPIO MP3 Player” and it was not listed in the Title, Description, Headings, Body Text or in any of the links pointing to the site.
So, on that basis, I think it is worth being specific and including approx 200 characters of relevant variations of the page’s primary keyword phrases.
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