German special characters and Google SERPS

How to optimize pages for "ß".

[pmkpmk]

Hi,

one of my keywords not only has a "ß" in it, it also consists of two words. So I am confronted with these spellings:

Blue-Widgetß (this actually is the correct official spelling)
Blue-Widgetss
Blue Widgetß
Blue Widgetss
Bluewidgetß
Bluewidgetss

At the moment, my pages only use the first spelling. Even though Hyphens are omitted by Google, I still have three different spellings, and my pages are only listed for one of these.

However, traffic coming in from AdWords (where I of course use all 6 spellings) shows that web-surfers use all of these different versions.

What can I do? Use a wild mixture of spellings on my pages? Doesn't look too professional for visitors...

[ThomasB]

Unfortunately I don't have any tests about it but I think that you should look at the problem with a different perspective. Not on-site SEO could help you, link building would be the key if you don't want to have different spellings on your site. Try to get links with different anchor texts and you should be able to rank for them as well.

I'd personally have the most common version on the site and would try to get links for the second (and third) most frequent keyphrase. Asking a native speaker might help as well.

[killroy]

You may also want to investigate the popularity of a spelling versus the competitiveness. For example, depending on how greate the difference in frequecy is between the most popular spelling and the second most popular spelling, it might be hard to rank high for the most popular spelling, but easy for the second one.

SN