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I have small problem. My private site on ancient stuff contains many descriptions of monuments and buildings, and these don't always have standardised english names. I pick a title for the page, but I would like the page to be found by the other names as well.
Trying to write the aliases into the text will be difficult, as an alias can be in english, latin, italian or even a common misspelling of a name. I'd rather not show the entire list to the user, but I would like to show it to google :-)
Currently I have the aliases in a <META NAME=keywords ...> tag, but google doesn't care about that.
Now, how do I get google to match several search terms to my page?
I have tried adding the list at the end of the page, but it is awkward and not very pretty, mixing languages and with the occasional misspelling. The words will also have little weight at the end of the text.
I could dublicate the pages (everything is in a database) so there was a page for each title, but would be strange for the user seeing the same thing with different titles, and I might get punished for dublicate content (many pages differing only in the title).
I could try to sneak it in in a way that is visible to google, but not to the normal user. This also has some risks, and I am not sure how to do it in practise. An invisible layer (with display: none in CSS) would be invisible in most browsers (not NS4 though). Maybe that is the way to go, though is really is spamming google.
Another posibility would be to serve googlebot specially crafted files with the aliases inserted a few times. Somehow I don't like it. It would mess up my server-side caching schemes and make the programs more complicated.
How do other people handle this situation?
René.
An example: Julius Caesar was deified after his death and a temple was built in his honour. I have called this building "Temple of Caesar", but other possible names are: "Temple of Divus Julius", "Aedes Divi Iuli" and "Templum Divi Iuli". I should probably add "Tempio di Cesare" or "Tempio di Giulio Cesare" for my italian visitors, and "Aedes Divi Juli" and "Templum Divi Juli" just in case.
The site is the one in my profile, if anybody cares.
The way your example gets the alternate names in is good. It reads well and is informative to the visitor.
One possibility to reinforce it for Google and other search engines is to put a blurb on your homepage along the lines of "Can't find what you're looking for..." and link it to an index page. Use this page to list all of the possible titles (in alphabetical or some other order), linking each of the titles to the appropriate page. This way you have the title in text on the page and the title in a link pointing to it.
This appears to be very legitimate (at least on the surface). You're providing your visitors with an alternate navigation aid, a site map.
Whether Google or other SEs would agree...?
Jim
Have you thought about building translated pages for your foreign visitors? This would solve your problem and allow you to target each country specific term. If you do that, I'd be sure to drop in the meta language tag like this...
Italian
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="it">
This will tell the browser that the page is in Italian as the rest of your site appears to be in English.
You can also get creative with an opening paragraph and tell your visitors that this property is also referred to as [insert property names here] in [insert country here] and so on.
I'd also go one step further and figure out a way to work those Italian names into your main content, alt tags, title tags, etc... Don't overdo it and make it professional. It should read well and make sense to your visitors.
Have you thought about building translated pages for your foreign visitors? This would solve your problem and allow you to target each country specific term. If you do that, I'd be sure to drop in the meta language tag like this...
I think the task of writing Italian pages would be rather time consuming, even for some of the more interesting parts of the site. I just had the database count the amount of text, and it is all in all half a megabyte of text. I'd much rather spend that time writing text for the many pages with photos but no description. Maybe I should convince my wife to do it :)
Italian
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="it">
I already have the Content-Language HTTP header in there.
You can also get creative with an opening paragraph and tell your visitors that this property is also referred to as [insert property names here] in [insert country here] and so on.
I had been searching for some purely automatic way of doing it, but maybe that is the wrong way to approach the problem. Maybe I should try to take a middle way. I have everything in a database and I have written the programs myself, so I can scan the text for each keyword and for the keywords not in the text or title, I can add a standard phrase at the end of the document, saying something like "XXX is also known as kw1, kw2 and kw3", but only for the keywords not in the text. That will give me an opportunity to write then into the text and avoid the automatic text. Right now I add such a line inconditionally, because I wanted to get the aliases for each document registered with google for the next full crawl which should be due very soon.
I'd also go one step further and figure out a way to work those Italian names into your main content, alt tags, title tags, etc... Don't overdo it and make it professional. It should read well and make sense to your visitors.
The last part is the problem. How do I work a misspelling to the text in a readable and sensible way.
René
The last part is the problem. How do I work a misspelling to the text in a readable and sensible way?
You are correct, this is usually one of the toughest parts of optimization, targeting the misspellings. We had a recent conversation on this not long ago here...
Mis-spellings [webmasterworld.com]
It has been a while since I've done this but something I used to do was to include a paragraph at the top of the page that targeted the misspellings. I would alert the visitor that they spelled the word incorrectly, but would also let them know that half of our visitors did so too. This would eliminate any ill feelings that visitor might have and at the same time educate them on the correct spelling.
It is definitely a task that sparks creativity. You've got to do it in a way that is natural without offending your visitors.
