SEO Keywords is not a thing

A Shopify store was asking about using SEO keywords:

What are best practices for number of SEO keywords to tag to a single product? ... Is it better to maximize the number of SEO keywords, or is there a recommended limit? For example, Etsy allows up to 13 keywords.

There are a few ideas crossing paths here, all using the same words to describe different things.

• Product Tags: Shopify products can have tags which are text labels used to organize your products. They are mostly used in your Shopify admin for internal organization and by customers in search and filtering.

• HTML Tags: HTML (the code that powers websites) is made up of tags such as the title tag. That's how websites make text into a header vs bold vs in the color red for a few examples.

• Keywords: When you add content to your product description, you add words that describe the product. The more popular a keyword is, the more it's searched for, the more potential traffic you can get if your store shows up for that keyword.

• SEO Keyword Tags: There is such a thing as an HTML tag for keywords. At one point in time, the keyword tag would tell search engines what keywords the page wants to rank for. But meta keyword tags have been worthless and ignored for decades (don't ever add meta keywords anymore).

Some apps still add the SEO keyword code which is just a way to let your competitors peek inside your SEO plan. Seriously, any SEO or SEO app that recommends to add the SEO meta keyword in this day and age should be fired off into the sun.

In both Etsy and Shopify you can add tags to a product with different words.

Since Etsy is a marketplace, those tags are used by their search and product discovery system. You can think of that as Etsy's own search engine.

Inside Shopify, what you tag a product, doesn't impact search traffic. Shopify tags can help visitors already on your site find things or help you organize/automate your operations. Google only "see's" Shopify's product tags if they are visually on the page but they are treated no differently than any other content on the page.

HTML tags are absolutely important to SEO.

Defining specific phrases as your headlines, body text, and links are 99% of on-page SEO. There are many best practices for using HTML tags for SEO, including specific limits (e.g. have an h1 header, make the font size legible, etc). A well-coded theme should handle much of the best practices, the rest can usually be adjusted/customized as needed.

These HTML tags have no relation to Shopify's product tags. They just happen to use the same word, tag.

Back to the original question.

What are best practices for number of SEO keywords to tag to a single product?

I have a few pieces of advice:

• Add as few or as many Shopify tags to your products as you see fit. The goal should be to make your and your customer's life easier in regards to finding products. The more you add, the more complicated organization can get, but this won't impact your SEO efforts.
• Make sure your theme and product descriptions are using the correct HTML tags for the product page (e.g. h1 for product title, strong for bolding).
• Make sure there is not a SEO keyword meta tag on any page of your store (meta name="keywords").
• When adding keywords to your page content, make it flow naturally. Act like you're talking to a customer right in front of you. I highly doubt you would just spout out a bunch of words to see if they catch on.