There is no such thing as "Irish Whisky", there is, in fact, only "Irish Whiskey" – to the purist! The Irish and American spelling of the liquid fermented from grain comes with an ‘e’, whereas all the other countries brewing the liquid, like Scotland and Canada, drop the ‘e’.

This may seem a little trivial or something that only comes up only in a pub quiz – but it has other knock on effects. Here are the keyword volumes for derivatives of both terms. The volumes are for February:

The keywords marked with the ** don’t ‘officially’ exist to the purist or indeed the manufacturers in certain regions – but as you can see there are still huge search volumes for the term Scotch Whiskey.

Most of those searches, some 67%, come from the USA where the spelling of the amber liquid would be "whiskey". They are searching for a Scottish distilled beverage, but using their own familiar and localised spelling.

Likewise, on the home front, most of the searches for an "Irish Whisky" come from the UK and, again, using their localised spelling of the drink. Confused…. well I was?

So how does the spelling affect websites and search results. On a Google Search (dot Com) for both Irish Whiskey and Irish Whisky only one Irish Whiskey site seems to span and capitalise on both spellings www.jamesonwhiskey.com ranking number 3 for both terms. The word "Whiskey" indexed 113 times on their site and "Whisky" indexed 57 showing that they patently understand the nuances for search.

A web site that I think could really capitalise on the spelling/misspelling was www.celticwhiskeyshop.com where they are number six in a Google search for Irish Whiskey but don’t rank in the top 40 for the alternative. I realise that the volume difference is 16% of the correct spelling, but for a site that would be a Mecca for a whiskey/whisky drinker it’s such a pity they don’t try and optimise for the niche term.

The "Irish Whiskey" is probably blessed that its biggest market is the USA (by search volume) and they we share a familiar spelling.

But now consider the spelling from the Scottish side where they are 49,500 searches a month for the "misspelling" I think you would want to be focussing on the correct and incorrect. Search for "Scotch Whisky" and, as you would expect, there was a fine showing in the search results from the larger Scottish distilleries. But most of these disappeared when the ‘e’ added missing, in my opinion, a great opportunity to feature in US outbound search results, some 33,000 a month.

Of the top 20 sites that featured in the "Scotch Whisky" search, only nine survive a listing in the top twenty for "Scotch Whiskey".

To be clear and not to get embroiled in the rights and wrongs of the spelling which is academic at this point: A search for Scotch Whisky or Scotch Whiskey is an intention to find more information about a golden brown alcoholic product distilled from grain and brewed somewhere north of Hadrian’s Wall and nothing else.

But some of the websites don’t show up because they won’t optimise for a common spelling derivative as well as the local spelling.

The ever present debate on title tags and what is deemed its acceptable face. The agreed wisdom is that the title tag of a document will only be displayed to roughly 66-68 characters in Google. Other engines have their own set of rules. For example Yahoo will display strictly 120 characters.

I blame it squarely on the pixels. Somewhere, someone in each of the search engines has decided that the amount of title displayed in a search result has to be no more than X pixels in length. The number of characters displayed will then depend on the sentence structure i.e. how many double space characters or special characters (like this ? or this &) are used in the sentence will determine when it becomes truncated: The people at the World Wide Web state the following

The title should ideally be less than 64 characters in length. That is, many applications will display document titles in window titles, menus, etc where there is only limited room. Whilst there is no limit on the length of a title (as it may be automatically generated from other data), information providers are warned that it may be truncated if long.

Regardless of the vagaries of character length, there is general agreement that your page titles are of huge importance in the whole SEO process. But then page titles have to be looked at from two, sometimes dichotomous, standpoints.

Firstly there is the visual and search results aspect of page titles. Now here is a given: A web title in a set of results is only given a fleeting glance, in that brief encounter you only have a split second to make an impact with the interrogator. The page titles have to scream “Buy me”, “look here” or “your search is over” – that’s a given. On the other hand, as the page titles have such an influence on SEO, then why is it that we have to limit ourselves to the 66, 67 or 68 characters? There is nothing to suggest that anything after the 66th character will be ignored by a search engine. We know it won’t be displayed, but that’s a visual issue, not exactly an SEO issue.

So the best way to see something concrete on this area is to do something. When you create a sitemap for your website and submit it to Google via their Webmaster tools, they very kindly report back any problems it finds. I threw up three pages with elements trying to entrap and entice this friendly service and to see if it reports back any title tag issues. The title tags are 66, 121 and 140 characters respectively.

The page was duly surveyed and the short meta tag was the only issue reported. The page with the largest title had the short meta description, so we know that the page was given the once over. The final part of this experiment was to see if it would index a word contained in the three pages titles. On one page the word is visible, the other page it was not and the final page it is the 121 characters. Its indexed all the pages and actually in search results it ranked the page with the longest page title before the other pages. I am not going to take too much from the experiment. There were other influencing factors here that could have affected the search results.

I would however suggest that clever page titles can be written which allow you to use at least 120 characters and all of those words would be indexed.