What are considered repeated "words" in meta keywords tags?

Question

I realize that keywords and descriptions are old-school SEO techniques and many search engines ignore them. However, it seems like it's good practice to still include them in your HTML pages.

One of the best practices I've read concern not repeating keywords in the header tags. My question is then, what exactly is a repeat?

For instance, if I write a keyword tag like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="college football, college, football, college sports" />

Is the word "college" being considered as a repeat or do the commas signify a completely different word?

Answer 1

Most engines only count to 2 for keywords, so why waste the keyword utilization, you know? But it is a repeat but shouldn't worsen your chances. You should probably use this as your phrase:

college football sports,

---all as one phrase.You shouldn't repeat a key word more than two or three times.