UK English and US English

Hi,

I am maintaining a site used by both US and UK customers. The problem started when UK customers started searching for 'Customer Center' and got no results coz the web page does not contain the UK spelling 'centre'. I am using a CMS and I dont know if that would support this.

My real question is, having two versions of correct spellings how is the Search Engine world surviving? Can anyone throw some light (I am a new born babe in the SEO area!!)

Thanks in advance,
John

Depends on your CMS's capabilities -
some have a synonyms options for various attributes:
this may be one option...

Hi John

Foreign SEO 101

Where are you based US? If so get a UK/western europe server as this will help your "local factor" therefore more relevance.

Secondly get .co.uk if you can as this helps a lot again locality and relevance factor - biggy and re-direct it to .com.

Thirdly get good quality back links containing the keyword centre pointing to the .uk domain. You will then rank for both, or stand a better chance then you do at the mo.

fourthly start a PPC for centre if you can afford it.

Fifthly use on page factors if it make sense and your CMS lets you but if you do step 3 well enough you should have a good chance w/o changing on page factors.

Additionally I would set up Geo-targeting so when some one comes from the UK they get the UK version. Advanced stuff, I personally build my CMS my self to avoid issues like this but if this is not possible step 3 done properly will be enough depending on your competition.

That was very informative ... Thanks a ton!

Another easy option is just to try to avoid words that are different in the UK and the US. I did this with my gaming site, and changed "Contact Centre" to "Contact Us" for example.

Sometimes it is hard to avoid, for example in the US they call Fruit Machines Slots.

This is the shortcut, you have created for yourself and thats the easiest, economical way for small/medium business owners. But if you are more concerned with language, then it would be better of having separate pages targeting customers location wise. That's also helpful to get higher in the SERPs location wise. With separate page, you are free to use location in your page - such as in meta tags, title tags etc.

You could get registered users to select their locale, and then use different dictionaries based on that.

i dont think that you should work only for this matter, as you know all people can understand language so it is doesn't matter as far as information is concern. but if u r looking for ranking than i will suggest same like if u based in uk write according to your language and host your site on us sever. so it will be on ranking for both the keywords

Oh, wow, language can be fun, indeed.

This is a very interesting obstacle.

It sounds like you will be able to swiftly deal with it, but please post back with your resolution when you decide on one.

And good luck!

Thanks to everyone of you for providing inputs. As of now the CMS that I use (Plone) has keyword features for every page. I updated all possible spellings for a word like "Customer Center", "Customer Centre". Now when I search for "Customer Center" or "centre" it would return this page.

Thanks again .. you guys r d best!!!