Accented vs. Non-Accented

[dcheney]

A lot of the users of one of my sites get there by searching for proper names - often international names. These frequently contain various accents.

The difficulty is that many US users search for the names without using the appropriate accent marks - and they are not finding the pages in the search results.

I think what I need to do is to include the proper name without accents on the page as well - the difficulty is I would prefer it be visible to search engines but not users. (The proper name with accents is really the correct name.)

To give an example: the page might be about "Å Prøpêr Nämé" but I want folks to be able to find it in search engines using either "Å Prøpêr Nämé" or "A Proper Name".

Any suggestions on how to do this?

Thanks!

[cziffra]

I think the search engines automatically account for these differences, at least in some cases. I just ran a search on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for a word that contains an 'ë'. I ran the searches with both the 'ë' and replacing 'ë' with 'e'. The results for every search included sites that used 'ë' and others that used 'e'. This may vary with some searches, but they do appear automatically compensate for variations of more popular words.

[dcheney]

That may be true for more popular words - but in my case the terms are more third tier. In other words, its not like Berlin, Paris, Prague but more like the names of suburbs of those cities.

[dcheney]

I just found a reasonably good example - this is purely an example and appears no where on any of my sites. A suburb of Prague named "Nové Město". Searching for that (not with the ě but the real character there, an "e" with a bowl on top) vs "Nove Mesto" gives fairly different results.

(please delete if this is too specific - thanks)