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However I am a little confused about special characters. This was touched on in a few posts, but I need more understanding. Once you find your target keywords, and let's assume they have special/accented/non-English characters, what do you use for SEO and body text? Do you use the exact word for that language, or the closest English-character equivalent?
I have seen a couple posts that state people often search for the closest English-character equivalent, but other posts suggests many have their own language keyboard. I'm a little confused, but it would seem you don't want to optimize for the exact, proper term. That would then make the body text improper, right? I also noted another post that suggested building English-character "feeder" pages to the proper character pages, which is a little more than I would like to get into.
Am I making this harder than it has to be? (I do that sometimes.) What is the best route to take, for SEO, and proper translated pages?
In urls it´s not really possible until now to use special characters, which gives you the possibility to work in the closest ASCII version of the words. Also you could work them in in meta desc. and meta KW.
I`m not sure about the situation for languages like danish or swedish, but we do have experts here!
Opasia.dk - Google.dk db:
møller 84600
moeller 3590
Kvasir.dk - FAST filthered db:
møller 72952
moeller 1866
Conclusion so far, local engines recognize the local version of the special characters. Here mØller is the right.
>Do you use the exact word for that language, or the closest English-character equivalent?
The searches show that the engines see exact words. The English-character equivalent yields fewer results.
I would try to make the prober format into code if possible. That would be to insert 'Ø' and not '&oslas;'. However in my experience the html format '%oslah' would be picked up in most cases.
HTML code for danish letters altered to reflect difference - they can't be copy/pasted as is
I am wondering if an apostrophe is classed as an 'ascii character'?
Specifically, I am thinking of reserving a .com domain for an impending French and German SEO campaign. What would be the best course of action if the French phrase domain should really contain an apostrophe - ie. 'l'ecole'.
I assume that if this character cannot be included in a .com domain the only alternative is to simply omit it entirely ie. lecole?
suede
suède
Shot in the dark, having just started reading on XML. Brief excerpt from HTML4 Unleashed:
"The ENCODING declaration identifies the character set in which the document is coded. Unlike HTML, which favored ASCII, XML favors Unicode, which allows foreign character sets to be used far more easily than in HTML."
Possible that XML has usefulness for translations?
I think I would tend to optimise pages for really important keyphrases for both the 'accented' and 'non-accented' versions of the phrase, much like a English 'misspelling' of a key search term.
It was the aphostrophe in domains that was specifically perplexing me as I think a 'direct' translation of the English domain should really include this. Obviously, this 'direct' translation would be valid from both linguistic and cultural perspectives. I may approach a 'domain broker' I deal with and see if they have any thoughts on this.
Marcia, unicode will become more important as the globalization of the web proceeds at great speed. The ability to represent character sets like cyrillic for example makes it the inevitable choice. With translations however I see no real advantage using unicode. A website translation uses the targeted language and it´s characters, it doesn´t have to care for readability in other language areas with different character sets. But perhaps I´m missing your point (happens sometimes :) ) - what advantages did you have in mind?
What is the best approach to this? -
1: Optimise keywords with special character.
2: Optimise without special character.
3: Optimise with both
I believe using the third option will reduce amount of repititions I can use on the gas fields name, as I understand 3 is the agreed maximum to use in one page's keywords - UNLESS using the english-character nearest equivalent means the keyword is perceived as different by the Search Engines and not the same?
Any help appreciated!
>as I understand 3 is the agreed maximum to use in one page's keywords
Wouldn't say so...that is if you're not referring to the meta tag keywords, which is of limited importance anyway.
Your third option - give the engines both - is the best, if you target all engines, international and local.
throughout body text of article the Norwegian proper form is used, and I guess mixing both up in the text is gonna look really bad so i'm avoiding it ;-)
