meta keyword repetition and variation

[salientdigital]

I have a site that has really only four unique keywords (two 2-word pairs) that make any sense for the business. That is, unless you take into account a myriad of 3 and 4 word combinations using the original pairs plus one other word.

For example:

AZ foo bar, Arizona foo bar, foo bar AZ, foo bar Arizona

From what I gather, beyond a certain threshold you risk not getting indexed if you have the same keyword multiple times because the robot thinks you're 'spamming the search engine'. Futher, I am assuming that keyword order is of little consequence. Are these assumptions valid?

To put it simply, my question is, would I be better off having only a few key phrases with little to no repetition, or would I get ranked higher with the maximum number of key phrases which include quite a bit of the same keywords repeated in variation?

TIA -

[seobook]

meta keywords = use for phrases you cant fit on the page or commonly misspelled words. use as many variations as you like...it will have no effect on Yahoo! relevancy, it will only include the page within the subset of results.

if a page does not contain the words on the page then you want to try to stuff them in the keywords tag. spider viewable...not human viewable. generally I doubt it is going to hurt you with having too many keywords, but most pages do not need to list too many. many top SEOs do not list the tag because they believe it is no longer worth the time it takes to make.



meta description = use various versions of your keywords. make sentences that read well to humans. it can be used as part of the search result. various friend SEOs and whatnot have stated to me that they believe Yahoo! is putting decent weighting on this tag.

[Marcia]

unless you take into account a myriad of 3 and 4 word combinations using the original pairs plus one other word.

Those oddball queries can sometimes be your money phrases; often they're very targeted. People search in all kinds of ways - keep an eye on your logs or stats for ideas.

Futher, I am assuming that keyword order is of little consequence. Are these assumptions valid?

Keyword order is very important - it's what makes up exact phrases. A combination of exact phrase and words used individually is a good way to go, placed throughout the page. The page should read naturally without excessive repetition. And exact phrases in the metas and page title.

To put it simply, my question is, would I be better off having only a few key phrases with little to no repetition, or would I get ranked higher with the maximum number of key phrases which include quite a bit of the same keywords repeated in variation?

That's actually a couple of questions rolled into one. You can repeat in the metas, but you don't want the exact phrase repeated consecutively. Too, too many keywords dilutes the importance of what's really important, so a few highly relevant phrases with minor variations, with the phrases separated by commas, seems the way to go at this point in time. Put the other words/phrases in between occurrences of an identical phrase so there's a respectable degree of separation between them.

Keep pages focused, and if the stats show other search terms showing up consistently create additional pages for those.

[AussieWebmaster]

The use of 3 and 4 word keyword phrases also allow you to better optimize. There will be less competition on qualified terms and this is an approach more people should be using to get very qualified traffic.