Is there a limit on the number of meta keywords?

How many keywords to use and how to use them for maximum effect.

Meta keywords used to be very important. These days most search engines ignore them, but not all do, so it is worth putting them on your websites pages. However you should not overdo the keyword metatag since 'stuffing' (the practice of repeating key phrases over and over again in a keywords metatag) is frowned upon by search engines and since the tag is ingnored by most search spiders, it is also a waste of effort.

There is no official limit on the number of meta keywords you can have but each search engine sets their own rules. However, a good rule of thumb is that since an average page is generally around 500 words long, more than 50 words would be considered overstuffing.

Personally I keep keywords below 255 characters in total because most databases have that as a default maximum size for certain fields so you may well find those engines that do look at the keyword tag only look at the first 255 characters in any case.

If you don't bother with the keywords metatag, I suspect nothing bad will happen. The same cannot be said for the 'description' metatag. Although it has only a minor role in SEO algorthyms, Google often uses this tag for the content of the description displayed in search results. This it gets seen together with your page 'title' tag which is very important and definitly should be created individually for each page on your website.

Consider the 'description' tag as an advert, enticing people to click on your page. This does not mean using lots of superlatives. It mean concise descriptive text which highlights the benefit to the visitor of the page in question.

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