Do meta tag keywords have to be seperated by commas?

I have been told that if you use spaces, google and the like will attempt to mix combinations of your keywords into phrases.

Could someone please shed some light on this?



Thanks,

Ryan

You should probably use commas, but there are more important things you can spend your time on:

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165061

umm interesting. commas it is :)

The last good 'official' explanation I've seen about meta keywords was a Mike Grehan interview (http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/april_2004.html#yahoo) with Yahoo's John Glick. It was back in April 2004, so things might have changed since then.

Each keyword is an individual token separated by commas...

So I could put...laptop computers, desktop computers, palm computers...

...then ‘laptop computers’ will count for ‘laptop computers’ and not ‘laptop’ or ‘computers’ separately. So doing it like that means that you're not going to be penalised for keyword spamming on the word ‘computers’.

It's quite a long interview and this section is probably about 2/3 of the way down.

You should probably use commas, but there are more important things you can spend your time on:

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165061
Hard to believe Danny wrote that post in 2002. Anyway here is one more vote for commas. I know the trend is to poo-poo worries about meta tags, but every little thing does matter. Now back to link building!

seems the only definitive answer to seo whether keywords, descriptions, titles, content, links, is to do the lot , and keep your website updated

Use commas. I wouldn't waste too much time over meta keywords, they are probably only used for spam detection anyway. :)

I wouldn't waste too much time over meta keywords

Yeah, the meta keywords element might not be of much help with the SEs, but I actually find it very helpful as an aid to writing.

After I write an article and then try to form the meta keywords it helps me focus on some questions: Did I say what I started out to? Did I miss anything relevant? Did I use synonyms, related words (semantically rich content)? Etc...

For me it's a discipline that helps immensely.