Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I have a question about accent marks... But first some background.

I run an online retail store providing earthborn & handmade products mostly related to home decorations. I recently noticed the word "Décor" found in some URLs as well as search engine quarries occasionally posts as "D?cor."

This started me thinking. Although the proper spelling is, ‘décor’ (with the accent mark) I doubt people will search ‘décor’ (with the accent mark). They will likely search ‘Decor’ (without the accent mark).

Is this a situation in which I should not use the proper spelling within my site, and should delete the accent mark in order to match search quarries more accurately? I would love to hear the perspective of some SEO gurus out there.

Thanks


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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

Vincent,

The # 1 thing for amateur SEO`s is to think like your customer.  So try and think like they would when typing in the words in the search box.  I would spell it same as they would and target those same words or phrases.

Do use an analytics tool?  If not try   google analytics.  It`s free and extremely helpful.  Secondly, look into a tool like www.quantacast.com  it`s also free but gives you more detailed information regarding the demographic of people visiting your site.

Over time you can look at the results and begin to alter the keywords and phrases you target to match the terms your visitors most often search for.

I subscribe to several daily SEO newsletters.  Here are some links to the ones I find most useful.

John Alexander daily SEO tip: short SEO tips once a day
EntireWeb Webmasters Newsletter

I think that yes, people won`t look for the accent mark (if they type in "decor" at all ... I would use the keyword suggester to find some other things).
And yes, the accent lends to all kinds of problems in terms of search engine crawling, HTML, etc.

Maybe you can just put it wrong a few times in the site? You don`t have to put it wrong every time for it to work.

etutor... Yes, I am `connected` with google`s tools. Thanks for your advise.

nhgnikole... I think I will pull out the accent everywhere.

If anyone else has comments I would love to hear them.


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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

I concur with LeTutor. It isn`t about proper spelling and correct character inserts on the search engine query line. It`s about typing a word. IF there are enough pages with those special characters, you`ll get from Google, "Did you mean...." and whatever.

But take résumé for example. If I`m searching for a company that does resume writing, I don`t have the time to pull up the Character Map, find the accented "e" and paste it into my query line.

I`m not sure, but someone will have the answer, but I suspect that SEs will strip the special characters and go with the best-match spelling of the word, based on character proximities. So résumé would become resume based on r?sum? and some complex algorithm.

I concur with my colleges and suggest pulling the special characters on the basis of SEO alone. On occasion I also included common misspellings in my keywords. You would be amazed at the benefits!
It has always been a risky proposition to use certain special characters on a website. As you have found out HTML 4.01 does not support all of the characters included in Unicode or ISO 10646 which is why the dreaded ? appears.

Good Luck!

Regards,
Howard


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ourmonmouth.com Full-Service Internet Solution Provider and Business/Community directory of Monmouth County New Jersey.

I`ll add my vote to the group saying pull the accent marks Vincent.

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chuck fuller

Crap! Looks like I have some time to spend pulling out the "é".



Learning, learning...




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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

Y`know, HPS brings up a point we`ve all forgotten in the various SEO threads. That`s the concept of specifically including common mis-spellings in the content! Way to go, HPS :-D

Another, although Google handles it well, is the use of a hypen. For example, is there a search-engine distincting between "cook book" and "cook-book" and "cookbook?" Yes, in many instances.

Special characters, on the other hand, require using a utility program of some sort to include them in a query line. That being said, Vincent, you could probably get away with pulling only half of the "é" characters, and leave the rest alone. :-)