characters ignored by SEs

how to "braket" word without making it a "new" word?

[LifeinAsia]

We are displaying a list of company information and the company's category. We want to set off the category from the company name (something like: "Company Name [Category]"). However, as Category will often be keywords, we want to make sure Google, et al. actually interpret the words as "Category" instead of "[Category]" as will rarely be searching for "[Category]" in Google. :)

As a last resort, we could just use a different font color, but we'd prefer square or curly brackets or something else.

Any thoughts?

[jimbeetle]

You're going to have to do some tests for each search engine to determine what characters they ignore as parts of words. For instance, Google indexes the underscore and the hyphen as part of a connected keyword and ignores many other characters.

_widgets_ or -widgets- return different results than widgets

:widgets: or (widgets) return the same results as widgets

Yahoo ignores the underscore and other characters, but gets hung up on the hyphen.

_widget_ or widgets return same results

-widgets- returns different results than widgets

As far as I can tell the square brackets are fine, but don't take my word on sussing out every possible situation, that's your job ;-)