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I have been struggling with this questions myself lately too. After the recent updates, i have been Googling around on various keywords. Basically i used words like product location and started searching on various industry. Some interesting notes i found: moneylender "location" -  top 3 sites occupied by a site with the same design and obvious link wheel. The design of site consist of just 3 images each with their own h1 linking out to 3 different money site(i hate this term) below is some text with links that goes out to the exact same site designs. Private investigator "location" - did a search on this as i had a friend with me at that time in this industry and the top result that came out is a site that no one in the industry has any idea whom it belongs too (and this is a small industry here where everyone knows each other). Curious i checked more and discovered that the site has another website with a TLD that end differently. eg:privateinvestigatorlocation1.location1 and privateinvestigatorlocation2.location2. Both sites has the same text and design! only changes was the location1 was changed to location2. 3rd search SEO location -  the number 1 site has a pa 1 da 1. 0 back links. over and over i did searches and honestly the results are disappointing for me. Got troubled by it and decided to invest in tools like seo moz and this just got me even deeper into the confused zone

"Welcome to SEO, the industry where everything's made up and the points don't matter!" Realistically there's no 'international standard' as everybody does their keyword research slightly differently. If you're looking for a step by step I recommend starting with the SEOmoz guide - http://guides.seomoz.org/chapter-5-keyword-research - there are a list of tools in there that most of us use. 10 steps to advanced keyword research - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research And an alternative approach (though still similar) from Lisa Barone - http://www.searchengineguide.com/lisa-barone/five-steps-to-effective-keywor.php Read these, combine and compare and you should be able to come up with something that is workable for you.

I have heard that Google does indeed use characters after the 65 character display limit in its ranking algorithms. Is this true and does it therefore make sense to have title tags longer than 65 characters, so long as the first 65 characters (or 60 in many cases) are a complete thought on their own? Here is a page describing this strategy: http://www.seologic.com/faq/title-tags.php#limits