"We (the British and Americans) are two countries separated by a common language."
GB Shaw
There is a patina of competition friendly stretching from the North Atlantic, and misunderstandings can be humorous and worthy of telling several times a whiskey. As an American replied when asked by an Englishman, why he uttered the words so curious, he said "maybe we went to school different.
Well, different schools, it may be, but the language is changing on both sides of the Atlantic, and anyone with a website that wants to enjoy two of the biggest markets for online business, needs to know exactly when the search engines it is important.
It was Noah Webster who changed a lot of words to their present form. Slowly, he Americanized spelling. He chose s over c-ie such as defense, he changed to the new urgency in words like center, the traveler traveler has changed, and although at first he kept the u-ie such as color or a favor, he has changed in later editions of his dictionary.
So what are the ramifications for SEO.
Take for example www.opexhosting.com .
OPEX are a solutions provider call center in the United Kingdom, while on the face of it would use key phrases like call center, or contact with the center, with the "er" ending as set out in the United Kingdom.
It is not quite so simple that.
A tool that says it provides results based on what your target market is the key word search tool Yahoo Marketing (Overture).
If I type in "Call Center in the section intended to present the results of the United Kingdom, I think the spelling of the United Kingdom does not come at all in the spelling of the singular word. It seems that the spelling of the United Kingdom of "call center" has fallen from the radar entirely.
Are we confused about the spelling in Old Blighty? It is not the first time. We could at 60 miles, but then go 100 meters, a hot day can be over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but it's cold in sub zero degree centigrade, the cars are filled in liters, but a car that does 50 miles to the gallon is doing its part to save the planet.
I'm not transfer back to my keyword tool and faithful tried again with "catalog", and he returned with results spelled "Catalogue".
Smelling a rat I jumped across tool for opening bid, and noted that the bids were exactly the same for U.S. and UK spellings. It seems that the Yahoo Search Marketing (or what is Overture) bundles U.S. and UK spellings in the same pot. I was not going to get meaningful data here.
So I took a look at the suggestion tool keyword to wordtracker.com who finally gave me the results identifiable. With its own database search for words, He told me that 570 people a day have been looking for call center (U.S.) and 92 were looking for a call center (UK). For example, British English is most likely still in use in England.
But how search engines react to the different spellings?
Google takes notice. If we type "contact center" in Google we obtain different results contact center ', as we do for "color" and "color", if Google does not just combine the results in one big chunk.
How the results differ? Well, to start the U.S. version of Google, which seems to be 70% to 80% Google traffic, even in the United Kingdom, call center "receives 947 million results, and" call center "receives 157 million, which ratio is very similar to Wordtracker results about 6-1 U.S. UK spellings.
If we look at google.co.uk results are, safer, more biased toward the results of the United Kingdom, including spelling. But with many sites in the United Kingdom reports only 25% to 30% of traffic Google from the UK version of its search engine, we are in a quandary.
If we search on "centers Call in the U.S. version of Google, using the English spelling, the number two slot is a site that does not have the English version of the word him.
In simple terms.
If you are an American or an English site with keywords that require different spellings for each side of the pond, and you want to conquer the market, or others, or even in the case of sites in the United Kingdom, be sure to cover all angles in your own market, best optimize for both.
So how do we do this.
One way is to maintain a co.uk. (Or. Com.au etc.) and a com. site. This may stumble on Google 'duplicate content algorithm "made popular in the Jagger update, and efforts marketing, such as construction of a link, it would require two separate sites.
Another possibility is to use both in the United Kingdom and spelling of U.S. content in the same site. But how does this look in a site that tries to tell his visitors that they are a business proposal eloquent. Well, it is possible to put different spellings in things like meta tags and image ALTs. It is perfectly legal, even if Noah Webster could return to his grave.
Dominic Reid is a Search engine optimization analyst who runs OpenG SEO.
