From my understanding a Search friendly website consists of the following Meta Data. (I know there are other factors but i just want to focus on the 2 below).
1) The Title tag > Must be unique to each page & less than 60 characters, yes / no?
*How come some of Ireland's Top (I assume top) have title tags with more than 60 characters - Is this not considered bad practice then by the professionals?
2) The keyword tag > Google does not recognise this tag & other search engines such as yahoo only take note of 2 keywords!
*Again if this is all to be true then why do I see so many online marketing companies stuffing their meta keywords with lots of keywords.
Therefore if I/you were to use a title tag with more than 60 characters this may be considered poor SEO? Also Google the largest search Engine in the Globe & with 95% search in Ireland do not recognise the Keyword, then why bother stuff your meta data with keywords like so many are doing?
SEO Myths exist because people keep looking for check-list SEO. Search engines and subsequently SEO is a system. You'll struggle until you can balance a system in your mind rather than a set of yes/no answers. Systems don't just work in On/Off - they work in balancing different inputs.
The key suggestion that Google will keep pointing to is build a page for a user. There are no Page Title lengths and different lengths will work on different pages. A page title is designed to work with a description in a set of SERP results to describe itself to a search user. The user can then determine if they are interested. Get either too long and it will get concatenated and may not work well. Sometimes the best page title is one word, sometimes it might be ten.
A good few years ago, a very good systems-style SEO was in a conversation with someone who need a "straight-line" answer and kept asking "how many words" do I need, how many H1 tags, how many xxxxxx. The SEO was trying to say, well how many words do you need, to which the enquirer said "well, I don't need any, I want to know how many Google needs." The check list reply was 250 - and from that a myth that's hung around for 9 years is that you need at least 250 words on a page (and many variations of it).
Same with page titles.
Keywords Myth: I hate giving these up because it helps us easily identify the good from the bad but ultimately Google doesn't have a filter for Keywords but it also doesn't ignore them. They are part of the indexable content. Think of what happens when you process flour - you separate the elements of the seed - the chaff, the wheat germ, the other parts. They are all then packaged separately and the flour is ground down into powder. Google deals with each element in different ways - like the Page Title and Description for the snippet (or including the DMOZ title for specific searches) and then it checks the directives (index, follow, canon, rel) and then it grabs the content by parts - text, alt text, headers etc.
The problem with Check list SEO is further compounded as it goes from On/Off to Good/Bad. Like people have developed "theories" that putting flash into a page is bad (-v- putting a page into flash which *might* be).
Another myth is that "Video" is good for SEO. Which has never really made sense as a statement. It comes, I suspect, from early-adopter advantage that was gained when people put up videos into YouTube and they "ranked" (within Youtubes special linear spot near the 4th or 8th SERP). But that to me isn't "good for SEO" - that's just a handy way to rank quickly. Early Adopter advantage is lost in many areas.
Bing allows 2 keywords per page. I doubt they've built in a penalty unless there are huge amounts of keywords or the range is quite wide.
When you think about it, keywords are really a dinosaur, library-style way of ranking. Its also very easy for people who are still thinking in straight lines to understand and share. It "makes sense". But when you take a search engines perspective, and every site has the same keywords, its not a really helpful way to determine Rank Order. So if you have 1000 sites with "Hotels in Dublin" as the title, description, keywords - how do you effectively use this data to rank them? If the site is about Hotels in Dublin - that's the page name - Google doesn't need assistance by "re-enforcing it". That's why probably less than 20 of Google's 200 signals are probably on page (about the same page, some others will be there but applied to other pages).
So if you are Hotels in Dublin but also a spa - then build a micro-site (mysite.com/dublin-spa/) and build a series of pages about spa and spa treatments. If you are at 60 words in a page title you've lost the plot...
