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I've been told it is bad practice to have keywords in the meta tags that do not appear in the page content. In this context, does text in the title attribute count as content?
For example if I had:
<meta name="keywords" content="apples">
And the word "apples" does not appear anywhere on the page, but I also had:
<a href="/products/" title="Purchase apples and oranges">Fruit</a>
Would this be considered bad?
Okay, well anything in Meta Keywords is essentially ignored by Google at this point. So, while making sure you're not keyword spamming there is a good thing - I wouldn't stress about it.
As for text in a link title, Google doesn't process that either.
http://maileohye.com/title-name-attributes-html-anchors/
In general, do right by the user and you should be okay. If there's actual content on the page (specific or semantically related) then you can use it in the meta keywords and link titles.
If the title attribute carries any SEO weight it will be little as it is too often abused. But you should use them when they are appropriate as they are a good usability tool as they can help users understand where a link will take them. So definitely use them and if they help you with SEO, too, then it's an added bonus.
Think of your users first and SEO second. Most of the time by making your site better for your users you also make it better for SEO.
The question I would ask is why do you want to use these keywords if your content is not about them, or if your content is about these keywords then why aren't they in the text of your page?
