Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to formulate keyword in language that has cases and foreign characters
-
Hello everybody,
this is my first but foremost headache causing question that i can't seem to find answear to for a month already.
I live in Lithuania - small eastern European country and my native language has all "fancy" things that one could probably immagine (tenses, cases, compound forms, foreign letters: ąčęėį..., genders, declensions etc.)
The problem is: how to formulate keywords correctly for my SEO to get the best results?
I'll try to explain my problem in detail by using few different cases on the same aspect:
1. If i'm using keyword in nominative case which is "atvirkštinis stogas" (reverse roof eng.) - i usually can't follow all of the recommendations for SEO: add keyword in topic, follow the keyword rate in text, because the same keyword will be repeated for numerous times but in many different forms because of the nature of language itself i.e. genitive case - "atvirkštiniam stogui", locative - "atvirkštiniame stoge".
Even MOZ page analysis doesn't recognize these cases as the same keyword. How about Google? Searching for keywords in different cases also gives slightly different results - some websites drop by 5 - 7 places on google searchpage No.1.
Possible solutions:
a) Formulate all keywords in text by using only nominative case which would totaly limit writer to a first-former kid writting capabilities and result in nobody reading the text at all.
b) Formulate keywords according to mostly used keyword in text, which would affect organic search because everybody is searching for keywords in nominative case.
Note that everybody here in Lithuania usually use the nominative case in search window on google.
2. The use of foreign letters (ąčęėįšųž).
If we use the same keyword "atvirkštinis stogas", we have only one letter "š" that is causing a problem.
In normal texts we use all of these letters, HOWEVER, nobody is ever writting these letters while searching for keyword in google, so normally they would search for "atvirkstinis stogas" with "s" instead of "š". If you search for these two keywords "atvirkštinis stogas" and "atvirkstinis stogas" you also get slightly different results.Possible solutions:
1. Use keyword with foreign letters and have perversed search results, because everybody will still search for keywords without them.
2. Use keyword without foreign letters which will affect SEO and tell me that I don't have any of my keywords in text, topic, url, etc.
Any ideas on how to solve these puzzles?
-
HI,
I feel your pain coming from Greece with many of the same issues regarding how people search vs how the language is 'properly' written.
I cannot give you a definitive answer but I will tell you how I approach it.
1. ALWAYS write site texts in a grammatically correct way.
I cannot bring myself to use foreign letters in place of accented letters or write greek words using english characters even though that is often how people search for things. It looks totally spammy and unprofessional in my opinion so it is a non starter.2. The moz page grading engine has a lot of trouble with foreign languages and their different tense cases. I think google has a better understanding of this complexity and is likely to only get better at understanding that words in different tenses are all referring to the same subject.
So with the above in mind I would suggest for your specific questions:
1. Write the texts in a grammatically correct way that serves the interests of you visitors and present your subject in a proper way. A good writer should be able to find a way to include a variety of tenses and phrases that address the same subject. Depending on the use of the text you can get an 'extra' nominative case into places like a caption for a photo for example. If you search for 'atvirkštinis stogas' you will see already that google is bolding some of the search results that are not exactly that phrase (stogo, stogai) which I assume are a case and plural variation(?). So google does appear to understand some of the variations already.
2. For minor foreign character variations it could be worth popping one version into the page in a non obvious place (maybe a img alt text?). I am not really saying this is a good tactic - but it might be worth testing to see what happens. Generally if you are ranking strongly for the properly written phrase then you should be pretty strong already for the same phrase using a non accented character in place of an accented one and a single appearance of it in the page might be enough to make the difference.
Hope it helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Huge difference between GSC ranking and browser ranking for certain keywords: How to proceed?
Hi, There is a huge ranking difference between the GSC and browser for our primary keyword. As per GSC, our ranking is around 15 and when checking on the multiple different incognito browsers it's around 50. How to handle this? Which is the accurate one? Product expert from Google forums claim that what I see on browsers are the personalized results; but I tried on different browsers with different connections. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Can 'Jump link'/'Anchor tag' urls rank in Google for keywords?
E.g. www.website.com/page/#keyword-anchor-text Where the part after the # is a section of the page you can jump to, and the title of that section is a secondary keyword you want the page to rank for?
Algorithm Updates | | rwat0 -
URLs contains other language than English
I am in need of your advice in regards to urls of my new sites. I have got one site from gulf region site is in English and Arabic language. The issue is we are getting url from both. Some are Arabic, do you guys think it will effect the ranking result? url example is : www.mydomain.com/بيع-بي-سيارة
Algorithm Updates | | Mustansar0 -
Meta Keyword Tags
What is the word on Meta Keyword Tags? Are they good to have, or bad? Our biggest competitor seems to have them.
Algorithm Updates | | Essential-Pest0 -
Ecommerce or E-commerce as a Keyword?
I have done a good bit of research but am not sure which word to focus on. I feel that the trend is moving towards no hyphen but I do not have any data to justify that other than google trends. Here is the research I found: Google Trends says ecommerce is more popular
Algorithm Updates | | Manseo
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=e-commerce%2C%20ecommerce&cmpt=q Ngram says e-commerce
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ecommerce%2Ce-commerce&year_start=1990&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cecommerce%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20commerce%3B%2Cc0 Google Adwords Keyword tool says e-commerce:
e-commerce has 33,100 monthly search volume
ecommerce has 14,800 monthly search volume What do you think, will ecommerce overtake e-commerce in the future monthly search volumes? Ecommerce or E-commerce?0 -
Special Characters in Keywords
Do search engines consider keywords such as "1099 E-File Software" & "1099 "EFile Software" the same? Many of the keywords for my website will have a dash "-" when properly spelled out but there are many users who would simply omit it when spelling the word. Another example would be "W-2 Software" as opposed to "W2 Software".
Algorithm Updates | | Stew2220 -
I thought META KEYWORDS tag was dead?
http://www.wpkube.com/wordpress-seo-plugin/ this article just came out as a one of the many guides to Yoast's Wordpress SEO. I am surprised it mentioned: Use meta keywords tag: Google reportedly doesn’t use the keywords that your enter for your posts but as Google isn’t the only show in town, you might want to check this box.Recommendation: check I stopped using meta keywords tag because Google doesn't use it any more, plus if you are in a competitive field by using keywords you are giving free keyword research to your competitors? Does any one still use meta keywords here? If so why? Google doesn't use keyword tags, has anyone experienced a dis-benefit to meta-keywords tag from Google ie. dropped rankings etc.?
Algorithm Updates | | vmialik2 -
Keyword density and meta tags
Hi, I've just checked the number of keywords appearing on my website's pages. On some of them the keyword density was way too high (7-10%) if you included the meta tags, but all under 3.5% if I didn't include the keywords and description meta tags. So my question is - when looking at number of keywords used per page, do I have to worry about what's in those meta tags? Do the keywords in there count towards keyword density / number of keywords per page? Thanks, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0