But it turns out that you can dominate Google's search results in the short term via duplicate content - and here's the explanation, based on a talk I'm giving at Brighton SEO.

Look at all the traffic I got

Here's a graph that showed how I got loads of traffic to this blog by exploiting duplicate content. Don't look any further if you're easily offended or love the royal family.

WOW. Where did all that traffic come from? Where did it go?

I took this blog from a few hundred page views a day to 30,000 at its peak by exploiting the fact that Google was looking for new content when it comes to suddenly popular or brand new search terms. Then I stopped and I went back to normal levels.

I'm sorry to report those search terms involved Pippa Middleton's arse and underwear and super injunctions and twitter.

So I waited for something to happen that I knew would trigger lots of searches. After the Royal Wedding it was Pippa Middleton's arse. Then a few days later it was her underwear. Just as that died down, the whole Ryan Giggs / Twitter / superinjunction thing kicked off.

Each time something happened I would throw a short blog post together and publish as quickly as possible - my ambition each time was to beat the mainstream news sites to publishing something.

Then I pulled a trick - for a few stories, I republished the story shortly afterwards on a different URL and 301ed the first URL to the second one. Then I did it again.

(This trick only works on trending news topics - so search terms that are suddenly popular and which make Google think that it should throw away its usual search results and replace them with pages that have only just been published (to correspond with the new interest in the search term).)

Look, two results for the same content ...

Not sure what I'm on about? Well, look at this picture.

Step one: two results for the same content.

Hopefully at the bottom you can see that I have two URLs for my Pippa Middleton underwear pictures (NOTE: there are no pictures of this kind. She's in swimwear - blame the tabloids).

What I did

I took the first URL which was http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/pippa-middleton-underwear-pictures-google-updates-autosuggest and I changed it to http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/pippa-middleton-underwear-pictures-google-updates-autosuggests - the same URL but with an S on the end. I also tweaked the HTML title a bit (took the word its out).

How WordPress helped

Now a quirk of WordPress means that it tries to match partial URLs and will redirect accordingly. What this means is that if you tried to access the old -autosuggest URL you would get automatically redirected to the new -autosuggests one.

Try it with this URL: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/pippa-middleton-underwear-pictures-google-updates-auto and see where you end up. That's not a manual redirect, it's WordPress doing it automatically.

How this fooled Google

What Google sees is as follows:

• It sees some content on a subject everyone is searching for but no on has published on lately.
• So it shoves my result on page one.
• Then it sees I've published another URL.
• It's still desperate for new content so it gives me 2 results.

Of course, the 2nd one is 99% the same as the first one but (1) it hasn't noticed that yet and (2) it hasn't revisited the first URL to see that it redirects to a new one.

Now I've got three!

But if I can pull that trick once ... Here's another screenshot.

Hat trick

Yes, I've now got three results on page one. I'd changed the URL again. This time from -autosuggests to -autosuggests2. I didn't bother changing the title.

Again, Google is still desperate for new content. Everyone is searching for this term because American sites published the pictures. But very few UK sites have. So it gives me three results.

As a searcher, however, if you click on the old -autosuggest or -autosuggests URLs, which no longer exist, then WordPress will just match those to what it thinks you're looking for which is -autosuggests2. So you always end up at the same place.

Boo. Back to two.

Eventually, Google wised up to the fact that the first URL was 301ing (or was maybe the same, who knows). And it took me back to two results.

Back to two

As you can see, the first -autosuggest has now vanished.

Eventually, all the duplicates were filtered out and my current URL is now top of Google for a search on her undies. Oh good.

But for a crucial few hours, when loads of people were searching, I had the same content several times on page one of Google's results.

Conclusion

One side effect of this is that people think I'm a pervert. That aside, for spiking news terms you can insert the same piece of content into Google's results. It will eventually notice that the earlier URLs redirect or are duplicates of the later ones. But by that time everyone will have stopped searching.

To be honest, you probably shouldn't do this. It breaks Google.

You also need to be on the ball. You need to beat big news sites (if you're dedicated, this is possible). And it only works on spiking news terms (these news data tools might be handy).

And don't cock it up. Duplicate content is bad. Ask the Express. Or the Indy.

This is the last of my posts or conference talks on Pippa Middleton (here's my earlier talk on Karen Gillan's underwear). I hope you enjoyed them. Don't blame me for the fact that nation is a bunch of perverts.

The good news is that you can still send people updates via Facebook without having to have a page - you instead use the Open Graph protocol and a Facebook Social Plugin.

You see that box on the right hand side of the page that says "New: Get blog updates via Facebook"? If you press the like button in that then I get the ability to insert messages in your Facebook news stream - without my also having to run a separate Facebook page. Here's how to do it.

How to get Facebook to like WordPress

Two types of Facebook like button

The first thing to get your head round is that there are two types of Facebook like button.

With the normal one that you see on many websites, clicking it will share the URL of the page you're in with your friends. I've got one of those buttons up there, under the headline - although I've changed the word on it from "like" to "recommend".

The other type of like button allows you to become a fan of a Facebook page even without visiting it. The fact you've clicked it will be shared with your friends - but you're not sharing a URL, you're liking a Facebook page.

As a website owner, if someone does the former, that's quite good as the visitor's friends may see the link and come and see your site - but you don't get the ability to have an ongoing relationship via the first type of like button. Someone's shared your URL. That's it.

With the second type of like button, anyone who likes your Facebook page will have any updates you create or links you share appear in their news stream.

Using Open Graph to turn your website into a Facebook page

The second type of like button can also be used even if you don't have a Facebook page for your site. You use the Open Graph protocol to effectively turn your website into a Facebook page in Facebook's eyes (don't worry, it doesn't actually turn into one - it's just that Facebook treats it as if it is one).

So here's an example - this is one of the messages that I sent to everyone who had clicked the like button over there on the right.

The message I sent people

You can read about the Open Graph protocol here. There are two steps you need to follow. The instructions below are for WordPress but very similar ones will work for any other type of website.

Add Open Graph meta data

First you need to say in the opening HTML tag that you're doing this. You can copy the code from the Facebook page. But after your opening HTML tag, add: xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml" - you can view the source of this page to see I've done that.

Then you need to assign meta data to the page on your website that you're going to set up as the pretend Facebook page. I do this on my homepage - you can choose another page if you want (EG a page with special offers or a particular category page).

The meta data is explained here. But here's what I've added for my blog:

<?php
if (is_home() ) {

echo '
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/malcolm-coles-facebook.png"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Malcolm Coles's blog"/>
<meta property="fb:admins" content="175996222437753,522100824"/>
<meta property="og:title" content="Malcolm Coles: SEO, Twitter and UK newspapers"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="blog"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="The blog of Malcolm Coles. It's about SEO, Twitter, the internet and stuff like that. You'll like it."/>';
} else{} ?>

This is a PHP if statement which makes sure this code appears only on my home page and is pasted into my header.php file in the head area (if you're not using WordPress, you might need something different).

The meta data should be fairly self-explanatory. Again, it's explained here if you can't work something out. The one thing you might have problems with is the admins line - you need to insert Facebook user ID of your personal account. (To find your ID, look at your personal Facebook profile picture or album - the URL should contain it).

Add a social plugin

That's given Facebook the information it needs to understand your website. The next step is to add the relevant Facebook social plugin onto your site - that's the box over on the right that people can click to like your site.

You can get the code you need from the Like Box social plugin page. You fill out the box on the left, and then it shows you what the box will look like - you then hit get code.

The code generator for the Facebook like box

You'll be shown two sorts of codes: iframe or javascript. I've used the javascript version here, which means you also need to include Facebook's javascript SDK code on your page.

If you're also using the other type of Facebook like button (the one that lets people share the URL) I'd recommend using the javascript, not iframe, version of both as users can add a comment when sharing a page if you do.

Either way, add the code to your website. So in my sidebar.php file you'll find this code:

<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:like-box href="http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/" width="295" show_faces="true" stream="false" header="true"></fb:like-box>

I've also added a heading that says "New: get blog updates via facebook". You don't have to get a box that big - in fact, you can just use the standard tiny "like" button. I imagine users find this quite confusing (as they can't tell if the button shares the URL or likes the site) - so always add an explanation of what the button does (or else just trick them).

Adding the javascript SDK

If you are using the javascript version, you need to paste this code at the very end of your pages - in your footer.php file if you're using wordpress:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>
window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
FB.init({appId: 'your app id', status: true, cookie: true,
xfbml: true});
};
(function() {
var e = document.createElement('script');
e.async = true;
e.src = document.location.protocol +
'//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';
document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
}());
</script>

You might be thinking "you clown, you've forgotten to put your app id where it says that." It doesn't matter - I don't have an app id and it works fine.

It's all working - how do I use it?

Go to Facebook, click Account in the top right and choose "Use Facebook as Page".

You will see a message at the top that says:

Administer Your Page.

This is the administration interface for your webpage at http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/. You can see Insights and publish to the users that have liked your webpage. Only the administrators of the webpage can view this interface, other users are sent to the webpage.

And this is the key thing - you're the only person who sees what you can see. No one else see the Facebook page for your blog so there's nothing you need to manage and there's no wall where they can leave messages.

But if you click, say, link and share a link to a new piece of content on your blog, that update will appear in the news stream of anyone who has liked your site via this method - just as if you really did have a Facebook page and they had liked that.

One caveat

This method gives you a great way to communicate with people who like your website, without having the overhead of also managing a Facebook page.

However, you can't guarantee that people will see your status updates. There are two settings on Facebook news feeds - "top news" and "most recent". If they're looking at the latter, they will see your update if logged in when you send it (or if they look back that far). Whether they see it with the former view depends on how much Facebook thinks they want to see it - which depends on how many of their friends have also liked it, how many times they've liked previous updates etc. So there's no guarantees.

Insights and statistics

Once this is all up and running, you can also see data about who is doing what to your site. Here are the graphs for my Facebook insights.

Facebook insights graphs: you can click them for more detail

They look a bit crap as I haven't blogged for a while and also I only set this all up a few weeks ago.

If you liked this, maybe you'll also like the way I've shown the number of Twitter followers I've got using some PHP and wordpress.

And if you've got any questions, let me know below.

The trick to make infographics accessible and SEO friendly is to ensure:

• they're chopped into relevant sections (ie not one big image),
• text is text (you should be able to select it with a mouse)
• if anything has to be shown as an image, you set appropriate ALT text (the flipside of this is that, if the image doesn't add any information, you DON'T set ALT text - I'll explain this below.)

Making an infographic accessible

There's lots of infographics out there. I'm going to use this illustration from David McCandless - not because I've got it in for him (in fact I think he's amazing) but he's released it under a licence that says all non-commercial use is cool.

Also I should point out that I'm a crap HTML coder so if anyone can improve on this, do let me know. And I'm only going to sort out the bit that says "4 What now, Diet & Exercise" in the bottom left hand corner.

Separate images and text

As it stands, that bottom left bit is just part of an enormous image. So we need to separate out the image and the text, rendering each appropriately. I've taken a screenshot of the green jogger and the orange "4". Because that green jogger doesn't convey any information, I'm going to set that as a background image of a DIV. But I'm going to include the four as a proper image with ALT text, because you need it to understand how the picture is broken into 4 sections.

So here's my DIV (go on, try selecting the text), and here's my code (minus the sizes and the bits I had to put in to override my blog's CSS and get everything positioned correctly).

<div style="border-top: 2px dotted; border-bottom: 2px dotted; ">
<div style="height: 43px; clear:both;">
<p style="margin-top: 2px;"><img src="http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/four.png" alt="point four of four" style="border:0px;float:left;margin-right:5px;"><strong>What now?</strong></p></div>
<div style="background-image: url(http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/infotest.png); height: 76px; background-repeat: no-repeat; clear:both;"><p style="margin-left: 25px; margin-top: 2px;"><strong>Diet & exercise</strong> can improve your cholesterol levels</p></div></div>

As you can see, I created some divs, positioned some images and set some styles on the paragraph to make sure it didn't go over the little green man. The orange "4" has ALT text of "point 4 of 4" to help those with screen readers understand the structure of the information.

OK, you're thinking. That looks rubbish.

Apply a fancy font easily

So for my next trick, I'm going to change the font to something snazzy. To do so, we're going to use a font replacement method, making use of google fonts.

To use google fonts, you add one line of javascript to the head section. (If you don't want to add this to every page of your wordpress blog, you could use this plugin to add it to just the one post, not that I've tried it).

So here it is with font-family: Lekton; added to the style section of my paragraph above, and a couple of other minor changes to adjust the height (the original didn't use Lekton (I don't know what font it was), but this shows you can change the font):

What now?

Diet & exercise can improve your cholesterol levels

Is that it?

Yes, that's it. It might not look much but I'm not a designer. However, I've successfully divorced the images from the copy, made the copy readable by search engines, applied a fancy font at different sizes, and added ALT text to the only image that conveys information.

That, my friend, is all most infographics are. And with some halfway decent HTML and CSS skills, you could recreate the entire original making sure that all the copy was readable, and the images hidden (or not, as necessary).

What's with the background image and the image with ALT text

SEO heresy though it may sound, shoving ALT text on every image, even if no actual information is given, is annoying from an accessibility point of view - people with screen readers don't want to hear the information twice (once from the text, once from the ALT text).

So if the image is decorative, keep it out the way - either make it a background image or set ALT="" (don't just leave the ALT text off, as some screen readers may then read out the file name which is even more annoying).

And finally, if anyone can think of a way to improve this advice, do let me know in the comments, below.

Display the number of Twitter followers you have.

First, you need to copy this code, which I picked up here, and save it into your functions.php file (via the theme editor link in the left hand column of WordPress's admin page). You'll need to change screen_name=XXX to replace XXX with your username.

function get_follower_count() {
// first check the transient
$count = get_transient('follower_count');
if ($count !== false) return $count;

// no count, so go get it
$count = 0;
$data = wp_remote_get
('http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=XXX');
if (!is_wp_error($data)) {
$value = json_decode($data['body'],true);
$count = $value['followers_count'];
}
// set the cached value
set_transient('follower_count', $count, 60*60); // 1 hour cache
return $count;
}

Next, you need to call the number that this function works out by adding some code at the appropriate place in your theme - the sidebar.php file in my case. One suggestion is like this:

<?php echo (get_follower_count()); ?> others do.

The problem with that is that if you've got more than 999 followers, there's no formatting - so 1,000 comes out as 1000 with no comma. I know. Can you imagine?

The solution is to use the number_format command:

<?php echo number_format (get_follower_count()); ?> others do.

Now if you have 1,000 followers this will display 1,000 and not 1000. Sorted (though see comment below). (Picture credit.)

The new theme needs a lot of pictures to work ...

Anyway, if you spot any problems, don't like anything, wish something was here that isn't etc etc then let me know in the comments (unless it's about the small font sizes. I'm fixing them. God how many CSS changes do I have to make to fix that?!?). And as I've finally achieved a logo that changes on rollover, let me know how that works. Cheers!

Howler 1: Keywords are important

What WordPress says:

Keywords meta tags, on the other hand, are still used by Google and other important search engines to categorize and rank your website. Those engines compare the keywords with the content, giving you "points" for having your keywords match your content. Keywords are one of the most important meta tags you can add to your WordPress site.

This kind of conflicts with the official Google line:

"Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking."

Howler 2: Use the same meta description on every page

I won't quote the full advice. But it involves adding the same meta description to every page:

With these generic description meta tags, [your] website would be accurately described and that should please just about any search engine.

Which kind of conflicts with Google's official advice:

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. ... Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

To sum up

• Don't pay attention to WordPress's advice.
• Don't bother with keywords.
• Do bother with meta descriptions.
• Do follow my advice to easily add unique meta descriptions to every wordpress post / page.

That's it!

Like most bloggers, I'm plagued by comment spam - but I've found a good way to spot spam: Backtype. It's designed to let you see all the comments you've left on many blogs - but you can use it to check comments that other people have left that link to a specific URL.

Oh noes. 502 bad gateways ...

Let's start with Matt Call who left a comment, giving his URL as freecallindia.info, saying that:

"I had difficulty navigating past your website because I kept getting 502 bad gateway error. Just thought to let you know."

Blimey, that's helpful, right - I should be worried. I was a bit suspicious that his surname was "call" and it linked to a telecoms site with call in its name. So let's check out Backtype, and see comments linking to that URL.

Freecallindia: notice any similarities ...

Ah. There appear to be over 100 comments, all saying the same thing, all left by several people with different first names but the same surname.

I'm an authority

Some guy apparently from onlinecarinsuranceclaims.com left a comment about what an authority I am. Thanks. Finally, some recognition. But then I checked what other comments on blogs linked to that site.

Onlinecarinsurance: notice any similarities ...

Yes, a series of comments (more than I've shown here) about insurance, menace and huge corporations. Preceded by one saying:

Nice strategy Ajith.. though they say every backlink counts but I prefer dofollow links.. So I do check pagerank, type of link that are allowed.

Right, thanks for the heads up.

Maybe he did think it was a nice post ...

Someone giving thesoftstuff.net as their URL left one of those "nice post" comments. They're always spam, true. But, you know, maybe this guy meant it, and thesoftstuff.net sounded OK ... Let's use Backtype to check the comments he's left on other blogs.

Thesoftstuff: notice any similarities ...

Nope.

Some others ...

You get the idea:

• Randy, who gave his URL as crushandshred.com, left a reasonable sounding comment. Check the blog comment profile for that site, and you see a lot of people whose surname is Crushed leaving comments ... Update Randy has commented below that he always leaves useful comments, which his original one might have been. His latest one is certainly useful.
• Alex from instanthealthinsurancequotemaryland.com gave me a tip on an SEO post. He informed me that "Appropriate keywords make your search simple and also help your data searching quick too". Seems he gives out this advice a lot ...
• Then Danni from AcneTreatmentDigest.com came along. His comments fall into two types. He had a lot to say about the death of Patrick Swayze - now he leaves the same message on loads of blogs about how "using Adwords for the last 2 years and i can only say that it increased my online sales by about 20%".

These were all the undeleted comments I had awaiting moderation. Good old Backtype. Let me know if you spot anyone with backlink profiles worth a look.

Smart quotes: the problem

Smart quotes

Another is its habit of replacing normal quote marks with "curly" or smart quotes - the ones that look different at the start of a quote than at the end.

They look nice - but they tend to break copy and paste (especially when you're pasting code, such as my unique wordpress title / description code, and my code to add page numbers to titles in the loop).

SEO issue

I'm a Celebrity - but the I'm wasn't bolded

I also noticed that they can interfere with your SEO. I've just written a post about I'm a Celebrity 2009.

However, when it appeared in Google for a search on those words, the I'm in the title wasn't bolded, as this screenshot shows.

Why? Because wordpress had put a smart quote in I'm - and so Google wasn't recognising it as the same word as I'd searched for.

How to fix the smart quote problem

To fix this, you can disable the automatic smart quote function. Go to  your functions.php file, and enter the following code:

remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');

remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize');

remove_filter ('single_post_title', 'wptexturize');

remove_filter ('the_title', 'wptexturize');

remove_filter ('wp_title', 'wptexturize');

You can remove the use of smart quotes in other places, too. There's a complete list here.

NB This didn't completely solve the problem. Although wordpress now doesn't put curly quotes, the apostrophe in the HTML title is still rendered using the HTML entity of ampersand and then #039; - which means Google still won't recognise the word I'm in its results (ie it doesn't bold them etc). Everywhere else, however, wordpress now puts a proper ' instead of an HTML code.

I overwrote my wp-content folder as part of my wordpress upgrade - deleting all my blog's images, CSS and theme PHP files. I'll be returning to that ...

Anyway, I, and a few others who answered my plaintive plea for help, thought using the Google cache (the copy of your webpage that it stores) might help. Here's what it can and can't help with as a backup if you've ever deleted your whole website ...

Getting the words back

You can get all your words back from Google's cache (this was no benefit for me - I had all the posts in my database still. But if you need to get the words back, read on).

Obviously, if Google visits your site and finds nothing there, eventually it will replace the version in its cache with ... nothing.

So if you've deleted the words (either static webpages or your underlying database), visit the Google cache asap and start downloading / copying everything you wrote.

Here are some instructions for doing so if you're not sure how to use the Google cache (with more here and yet more here - all with varying degrees of assumed understanding)

If you are more advanced, some people have written scripts to automate this process. I haven't tried these, but if you have a lot of pages you want to find, try this one: Retrieving Google's cache for a whole website.

Getting the images back

Google doesn't store images. When you look at the cache and see them, it's either getting them off your server or else some other cache is serving them up (probably your browser's). The only exception is the thumbnail of your image you see in a google images search which is a google-stored file - so with smaller images, this might be usable (if you can construct a search in google images that makes the picture you want appear).

Anyway, if you see your images in Google's cache, save them asap (right click and save as or just drag to your desktop). Don't leave the page and come back later as they might not be there.

If you don't see images in Google's cache, you could try your browser cache (I'm assuming as it's your site, you've visited the page in question at some point). There's some advice on doing this (I've never tried it) here:

• Retrieve images from browser cache
• Resurrect images from my browser cache

There's some technical stuff about IE here.

Note for wordpress users

I found a large proportion of my images lying around my hard disk and trash file. Hooray. So I rapidly FTPed them across. Here are some things to watch out for if you are this lucky:

• Folders Remember, when you upload images they go into a certain folder. Make sure you put them in the right one (probably a date-based folder structure in your wp-content/uploads/ directory).
• File names If you have multiple images with the same name (EG image53.jpg), wordpress adds a -2, -3 etc when you upload later versions to the same folder (so you don't overwrite them). Your originals on your hard drive will all have the same name. You'll have to unentangle this by manually renaming your versions. I have vowed to always give my images proper names from now on as I had about 11 called image5.jpg in 11 different folders. Grr.
• Sizes If you use the wordpress image resizer (ie you choose a medium or large image as part of the upload), wordpress will rename the image as name-horizontalsize-verticalsize. Your original will be just name. Unless the image is massive, the easiest way round this is to edit the HTML view of a particular page/post in wordpress and strip out the dimensions from the file name. The blog reader's browser will resize the image anyway (not ideal, but better than nothing).

Getting the CSS back

Google doesn't store the CSS. You're stuffed here as far as I can tell unless you've saved a version somewhere.

Getting your theme back

If you've lost your theme (EG the files that generate the pages and include the post, your tags, categories etc etc), then it's impossible to get that back from the Google cache (despite this april fool about a server side decompiler in IE8.1).

Conclusion

If you've deleted a webpage or website, I hope this helps you get it back.

The Google cache isn't magic, and it's most useful for retrieving words. The best advice, of course, is to backup often, and especially before an upgrade. Even better advice for wordpress is to change the upgrade process to separate core files which need upgrading from user-uploaded ones ...

Google has now come out and said this:

Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?

A: In a word, no.

There's more here. But essentially, let's all stop bothering (we're not going to bother just for Yahoo, surely - although you should still bother if your site's own search engine uses them).

The only slight caveat is that if Bing is important to you, you might decide the effort is still worth it - and it is growing its market share. Bing says:

The <meta> tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.

When creating keyword text, remember the following:

• Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the <title> and <meta> description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure
• Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters
• Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the list

It's still important to get your meta descriptions right, of course (and here's how to generate unique ones for your wordpress post, page, tag, archive and category pages - along with tips on adding page numbers to them).
You can read more about which meta tags Google pays attention to. And there's help with implementing structured data tags for rich text snippets.