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Whats a best practice for creating websites due to the fact that i need to enter ö within the content/title/meta. Should I spell it without, and just use a "normal" character or do i put in this code everywhere. or do i spell it half the time with and half the time without. whats the best practice for seo?

Google takes into account user intent. Which makes things complicated(in my mind). The user will be searching without the "special characters" but because of the whole "user intent" thing, I don't know the best practice for this situation is.

Should I use a mix of both spellings?

Should I use the special characters in the following:

  1. Anchor text
  2. Headers
  3. Titles
  4. Meta descriptions
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  • personally I'd advise not to worry about SEO, but rather to focus the design/implementation based on your customers needs while on the content. If your customer expects to see the special character then put the special character in.
    – Steve
    Mar 9, 2012 at 18:38
  • Put your mouse above the [seo] tag which you have put on the question yourself and read the popbox.
    – BalusC
    Mar 9, 2012 at 19:18

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It'll mess with the results, here is an example search for the word anxw the English version of the Greek word anxious

Then search ἄγχω which is using Greek letters

Now search anxω which uses the Greek letter omega in the end

Just a random example of how the results appear different once you change a single letter.

I would personally use the English version of your product name, then use both the English and proper language and spelling of the product in the title, description and content of the page to build up dual relevancy.

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  • That's a good move. Another example is µTorrent, which most users spell as "uTorrent" even though it's really micro-Torrent or mu-Torrent. It's a popular enough app that Google should realize they refer to the same thing. Yet the SERPs for each term are still dominated by pages with that particular spelling variation. In fact, the only reason the official µTorrent site tops the "uTorrent" SERP seems to be because they use that common spelling in the domain name. So I'd definitely use the English spelling in domains & URLs at least even if you want brand consistency in the content.
    – Lèse majesté
    Apr 10, 2012 at 6:19

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