Ranking for different regional spelling variations

[2lame2rank]

Say I have a site about widget licences... or widget licenses. The site is of interest primarily to Canadians (as the widgets are in Canada), but also of interest to Americans who visit.

This is the same issue when talking about colour versus color, or other words with regional differences in spelling.

What's the best approach for ranking for both versions of the word in Google? Do I just go for the most appropriate local version and hope that Google will recognize (or recognize) that the word is the same? Should I switch liberally between the two on the same page, at the risk of looking like the page has spelling mistakes? Do I have to chase both options?

[tedster]

My preference is to use the spelling that applies to the main audience - and then get some backlinks that use alternate spellings if that traffic also seems important. In fact, if your pages are link-worthy, that often happens quite naturally.

In some cases, Google's linguistics programming will still bring you long tail traffic with alternate spellings somewhere in the search term. For me, the downside of showing a page with spelling chaos to the site's main market is just too big to play around.