Take a look at the SEO forums on the CS Cart forums:

http://forum.cs-cart.com/forumdisplay.php?f=45

I bet they know the best way!

Hi David,

Google/Bing etc. have very few problems recognising such characters in the Latin alphabet. It looks like you are mainly concerned with umlauts, which Google handles intelligently. For example...

• Google will identify the difference between a search for "Küchen" (kitchens in German) and "Kuchen" (cake in German) and offer up relevant results. This is true in Google US and Google UK, not just localised Googles.

• Search suggestions work just fine with these characters, and even with the standardised way of rewriting them when there is no accessible way to type them (for umlauts this is with an e following the letter). For example, in Google.de, type "Kue" and you will be given the suggestion "Küchen".

You are mainly concerned with brands, which muddies the waters a little because many people in English speaking markets won't bother/know how to type the umlauts. However, Google normally handles this well and recognises the intent.

I would recommend you ensure you consistent use the brand name with the foreign characters, as intended. Google/Bing and co. shouldn't have any problems. Which HTML encoding you use is by the by, in my opinion, as long as the characters are rendering correctly.

Unsure why SEOmoz tools are missing it, I can see you are using All in One SEO pack and you do have meta descriptions. You actually have 2!!!

The head area of your pages has all sorts going on with javascript and many link tags. If possible you should try to clean it up a bit, I'd suggest. Then obviously ensure you have only one meta description.

Hopefully when a moz staffer sees this thread they'll take a look into your bug.

They sure can, try searching in Google for:

~SEO

You'll notice that even the phrase "search engine optimization" is emboldened, as Google knows it is a synonym.

Alan makes some good points, and I agree 100% about not making the text read clearly; websites are for people first. However, sometimes making it read clearly means using synonyms or secondary target keyword phrases.

I'd say if you are targeting a single keyword then maybe it isn't so important, but with phrases of 3 words or so then the secondary phrases or phrase synonyms it does become more important if you want to target those search terms also.

I will just add that you need to be very careful. Maybe try the ones out that everyone has kindly suggested and then use SEOmoz Campaigns or other tools to check the quality of it.

This Whiteboard Friday post from last week has one of Bing's team pointing out how it is very important that your sitemap is of a high quality (no 404s, 302s or 301s for example), or it could be ignored completely:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds

I would say a bit of both. It is fine to repeat your primary keyword phrase several times on the page; the number of times depends upon the amount of content. SEOmoz's On Page tool recommends 4 repetitions. However, you should also try to use some synonyms and secondary target keyword phrases also.

A good resource I saw posted today which might be of interest:

http://lsikeywords.com/

Just to chime in on this, albeit maybe a little late now... I had the same thought as I was reading through this with using rel=canonical to point the old pages to the new for now, so the search engines don't have any duplicate content issues until a 301 redirect can take over when the new site is fully launched.

However, depending on your rollout schedule, this would mean that the SERPs would soon be indexing only the new pages. You'd need to ensure that the traffic diverter you are using would handle this. Otherwise you could put the rel=canonical on the new pages for now, which would avoid the duplicate content until you are fully launched. Then you'd remove it and 301 redirect the old pages to the new.

Just something you maybe want to think about! Hopefully your traffic diverter can handle this though.

Good thinking, but actually HTML pages are not necessarily static, so I agree with David that it shouldn't make any difference.