Comma or Space to seperate keywords

Just wondering if its acceptable to use a space to seperate the keywords, or if you should use a comma to seperate keywords in meta tags.

You should use commas. Spaces make it impossible to delimit key phrases.

Yeah You are absolutely right.

but i wanted to what effect it have on your SE rankings

comma will separate two keywords and space will not. When keyword is better understood by SEs, ranking becomes easier and if it is not then…
Its logical!!

You should use commas, if you space , then total words are one keyword. it is effect your SE rankings!

For title tag, I think the keywords phrases should have a space after each comma.

commas is better, it is much cleaner for the users to read the title…

To separate the keyword comma is used because it is acceptable by all the site.
You can not use space in the place of comma.
So be careful in using in comma and space.

I read somewhere a while ago now that you could leave out commas in certain places to kind of combine keywords, much like this:

modern art for sale plymouth devon,contemporary art painting,acrylic painting,abstract painting,

It said that with keywords structured in this way you could get things like: modern art, art, modern art for sale, art for sale, art for sale plymouth and so on…

Is this true or did I read wrongly? Is it better to separate every keyword with a comma?

Also what’s the right sort of amount of keywords I should be using? I thought it was about 25 or something, but I see sites that use lots more than that.

I thought it was about 25 or something

I belive that about 20 is the recommended ammount.

Using commas will not affect your Web page’s relevancy. It makes no difference to the search engines that use the meta-tag keywords attribute whether or not you use commas or spaces to separate your keywords. If it is easier for you to view your keyword phrases with commas, then use them.

I disagree. The meta keyword tag can contain a combo of keywords and keyphrases. How do you define keyphrases if you delimit with spaces?

Personally I’ve always used the comma, as i always thought that was the standard. But i’m starting to see some sites just use the space and was wondering if they were crazy or knew something i missed out on.

They’re crazy :wink:

Of course, you need to use comma (you CANT use space alone since KEY PHRASE can be made if there is no comma between two single-word keyword)

The most advisable to use is comma because it instructs the bots that words between the commas are just keywords and not key phrases.

Read post #10 - they’re on to something. Omitting the comma will give you more proximity hits between adjacent terms, such as: new loft condos in NY . Here, you give yourself a chance to be searched for lofts in NY, new condos etc.

Personally, I prefer not to use commas, I simply use spaces. There’s a reason for this, IMO.

Search engines read the comma as a “stop” and a “separator” for your keywords. Thus:

“hunting camp, camp rentals, fishing camp, ohio camp”

Will produce these keywords in the seach engine’s mind:

hunting camp
camp rentals
fishing camp
ohio camp

On the other hand, if you use spaces, you are not predefining how the phrases should be broken up. The search engines will instead break them up as needed to fit the keyword phrases that are seached. So, if you have this tag:

“fishing hunting camp rentals ohio”

The search engine can pull any combination of phrases from the list…

fishing hunting camp
hunting camp
fishing camp
hunting camp rentals
fishing camp rentals
camp rentals ohio
hunting camp rentals ohio
etc…

Plus, you’ve got less words, so there’s on fear of “repeat/spam” issues, or of lowering your density.

But, it’s personal opinion, there are advantages both ways and every SEO has their own style.