charset=iso-8859-1 vs UTF-8

I understand that charset=iso-8859-1 and UTF-8 can bring differences to characters and how their displayed.

But to serve english speaking countries like the US and the UK what is the best language encoder to use especially for SEO?

charset=iso-8859-1? or UTF-8​

Give us your reasons for using which one and how it helps SEOing?

 

Far as I know it does nothing for SEO. If teh googlies can't see a letter then they don't display that letter on search results.

More important likely is that you set charset in a meta tag, save the html document in that charset, and have your server also have the same charset listed. A would think a mismatch is worse than having the slightly more limited iso-8859-1 vs utf-8.

In general, though, UTF-8 is my preference for everything regardless of SE.

 

You say have the server same charset.. how can i check whether the server has the same charset... phpini? or phpinfo?

I use charset as i think its the normal standard for English in Britain.

 

The server response header is authoritative, and overrules any other method. Use the Firefox web developer extension to view the response headers, or use the wget utility.

gt@koko:~$ wget -S http://forums.digitalpoint.com
--2008-05-09 02:46:02--  http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
Resolving forums.digitalpoint.com... 216.9.35.60
Connecting to forums.digitalpoint.com|216.9.35.60|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 07:46:02 GMT
  Server: Apache
  Set-Cookie: bbsessionhash=a8b33a4e5c0568e8b88bdc3f4df1048e; path=/; HttpOnly
  Set-Cookie: bblastvisit=1210319162; expires=Sat, 09-May-2009 07:46:02 GMT; path=/
  Set-Cookie: bblastactivity=0; expires=Sat, 09-May-2009 07:46:02 GMT; path=/
  Cache-Control: private
  Pragma: private
  Connection: close
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Length: unspecified [text/html]

Code (markup):

The dp forums' server sets the charset to utf-8.

The second, if not declared by the server, is the

  <meta http-equiv="content-type"
        content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Code (markup):

in the html document.

If nothing is declared, the W3 rule is to default to utf-8, while your browser will default to the user setting.

The utf-8 server response is usually safe, because iso8859-x and ASCII/ANSI are subsets of utf-8. The problem that most likely arises is caused by MS and MS-oriented editors that save text as windows-125x, which uses non-standard encodings for several characters. If not properly declared, those characters are unreadable.

Still, it isn't an SEO issue.

cheers,

gary

 

Even though the server gets precedence, the html file saved in another charset or the meta tag set to another charset still makes me see funky "no-character" squares and >>A in front of punctuation on lots of sites. I take it that's because my user default is UTF-8 while Windows users have something else.

To see what the server is sending, I look at a page online, then View Site Info, as it's usually listed. So if the page was saved wrong, or the meta tag is wrong, the View Site Info still says what the server's set to.
I just manned wget... never used it before, looks quite useful!