I'm optimising an English site which has an accented e in one of it's main keywords (café) Does anyone know how search engines interpret keyword like this? For example, if the page titles, descriptions and on-page text use ' café ' will the pages rank for the word ' cafe ' which is what people are likely to type into search engines? Any help or ideas appreciated.
Now thats interesting, I too like to know the answer from the experts. I tried to search in wordtracker, Goodkeywords and overture keyword suggestions, all look ups failed. I know google handles many different language characters for search, how it treats special characters would be interesting to know.
As far as I know, Google does recognize the difference and if you are optimizing your site for special characters, google will see the different For example, the following search yields different results. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enPK219PK219&q=oprahs+debt+diet http://www.google.com/search?source...&rlz=1T4GGIH_enPK219PK219&q=oprah's+debt+diet In the first case, it actually asks you if you meant "Oprah's Debt Diet". Therefore, the ranking of a site for any given particular special character has to be different than the ranking of a keyword without the special character. It's a good idea to optimize a site based on what a user would essentially write but optimizing it for both can provide even better results as it would cater to both the keywords. Hope that helps!
Thanks for the replies. Optimising for what searchers will type, e.g. cafe means the site will look unprofessional, since it will have a miss-spelling all over it! A search for the two different keywords returns slightly different results, which means that they are treated as two different keywords. There are more sponsored listings for the cafe version, which indicates that is what others target. I think I'll use cafe in title and alt attributes, maybe in page descriptions and titles, and in deeper areas of the site. But I think on the homepage it has to be spelt correctly.
You could try one more thing. Keep the original spelling on the main page and in your linkbuilding, use the normal spelling
Actually, you can use both the accented one and the non-accented. Surfers sometimes don't bother to put an apostrophes on their keywords. You will know which of the two will be ideal or if having both is ideal by checking the two keywords in a keyword tool such as keyworddiscovery or overture. My two cents worth...
My own experience with Spanish and French language pages shows best results if you use the version without accent in your html (title, description, keyword tags) and the correct spelling in the visible on page copy. I'd like to see more commetaries, may be different observations, on the theme.
question: who on earth will type in café in an english search? besides no matter what you do, there are already very popular sites taking rankings for both cafe and café.
Agreed. But, if the domain name is an IDN, make sure you spell the domain name with accent in your text. Sounds obvious, but you would be amazed at how many sites provide free exposure for a site they do not own.
Very good question. I would think that they would consider it different since they treat misspellings and plurals differently. Might not find that problem on Yahoo.
As long as your pages are UTF-8, there is no reason to NOT use the accented version. However, the unaccented version is a keyword. For example, the Portugese Califórnia.com is legitimately about California and should use both as keywords. Same with Spanish domains LosÃngeles.org and SantaFé.org, in my opinion.
I think you have it right monfis. People aren't going to be typing an accented e into a search engine, but Google et al ought to be clever enough to pick up the alternative spellings.
People can and do type in accented words in search engines and browsers all the time. Check Ovt searches for the English/US version and other country versions. I don't understand why you would write that. I get type-in traffic daily to accented Latin domains. Länk.com, leFrançais.com, Cybercafé.com, Étudiante.net, and even enEspañol.biz and Españolas.biz get a lot of traffic - type-in traffic. Russian Cyrillic domains get the bulk of type-in traffic and clicks.
In SEO, "special characters" should not be used for one reason, if you can not type the character on the keyboard then most searchers will not type it. Therefore use only characters that the searcher will be typing into the search bar. Also, if you type cafe and café into the US Google search bar, you will get different results. This is very important when EU companies enter the US search environment. The company Hüper Optik used the same web page for both markets and supprise, there was no traffic. The instant they corrected the "u" and used Huper Optik instead, traffic was back. Since the US keyboards do not have a ü character, the searcher use the u. Simple fix is to use both in the title and description fields
I agree 100%. Use both. Searchers do type in with accents, but there is no reason to confine yourself to searches for one term version or another.
Basically we're saying that search engines do differentiate between the two versions, accented and non-accented. So use both. OK, I think that's clear!