Keywords in UTF-8

Will local search engines convert it?

[powerpuff]

Hi,
I have a question about submitting META keywords content for Asian search engines. My charset is UTF-8, the content of the keywords are Asian languages Japanese, Chinese... in Unicode. Will the Asian search engine take these UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters, when a user in localized OS and type in characters in s-jis or big-5; can they find my website?

Do I need to have separate pages encoded in s-jis, big-5 etc. just to make the search engine friendly?

Thanks for the advice

John

[bill]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld powerpuff.

I could have sworn a few others and I already responded to this post before it was moved, but I can't find those responses now...

First, there aren't too many engines anywhere that still place any importance on meta keywords. However, I think the issue here is the page encoding and how it relates to the search engines.

I recall the time when webmasters of Japanese content were warned not to use Unicode due to display problems with some browsers, particularly Netscape. There were some other problems involved as well, but I can't remember them now. However, due to these reports of display problems I made all my Japanese sites using a variant of the JIS encoding. Likewise with my Chinese site I stuck with GB encoding rather than Unicode. My thinking was that it was preferable to go with the most trouble free encoding available.

I have not really revisited Unicode as it still has a stigma attached to it for me. I believe Unicode is handled much better with modern browsers, and I hope support for it will grow. I'm actually a Unicode fan, I just don't use it ;)

My suggestion would be to have a Unicode site as secondary. I really don't see many Japanese sites encoded in UTF so I couldn't comment on how well they are handled by the SEs. I know some others here have played around with Unicode sites, so maybe they could tell you more.