Dashes / Slashes / Full Spots in Meta Tile.

[DavidLenehan]

Hello,

I have a question how about how google sees dashes, slashes, full stops etc. I am new to SEO so this might be dumb.

I sell refurbished printer parts. The majority of people search for the part number in google.

A typical part number might be "04.F5/S3A YA50" .  A customer might search for "04F5S3A YA50" or "04.F5/S3AYA50" or "04.F5/S3A YA50" or "04.F5/S3A-YA50". They aren't radically different but seem to effect the rankings.

At the moment I use the following stucture for the meta tiles, descriptions etc

04.T5/S3A YA50 (04T5S3AYA50) by OEM | mysite

Buy refurbished OEM 04.T5/S3A YA50 (04T5S3AYA50). Free next day delivery. 12 month warrnanty on all parts.

www.mysite/4F5S3AYA50

---

Part number (Part number no spaces) by OEM | Mysite

Generic text Part number (Part number no spaces) text

www.mysite/(Part number no spaces

My questions, should I try to include all the different ways a customer might search for a part number in my meta title, description, url etc.  Or should I try to include within the content of the page.

Many thanks

[perfectweb]

My personal thought is that you're doing the right thing as you are. You could possibly have an area on your page that lists possible varients of the part number in a box titled "Also known as" or something similar to increase user experience. I'm nto sure it will have a huge amount of SEo benefit though.

Whilst nto an expert on Google query syntax, I'm pretty sure things like full stops, slashes are more or less ignored. dashes are used by google to remove a part of a qury (e.g. "cars -audi" - find sites with the keyword cars but not the keyword audi) so maybe that is why you're experiencing sme differences in the SERPs when searching for the same part number with different combinations of slashes, dashes and stops.

[Guest]

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[DavidLenehan]

thanks Joel . Gary.

Gary, I always believed "-" was treat the same as " " or "" i.e. Monkey-Butler would be treated the same  as "Monkey Butler" or "MonkeyButler" or "Monkey" & "Butler". But after reading your response I am now not so sure. Your answer seems logical. Anyone know the answer?

I actually found a decent answer to my intial question in the Pro Video section about misspellings

[perfectweb]

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

Have a look at the reference, it shows that what I was saying about the "-" is true, although whether it is always honoured is another question!

It also suggests about arithmitic operators (-,+,/,*), as these could all be part of your part number,a nd your part number could sometimes look like an equation, google may try to "solve" the equation. Ig uess the way to get around that would be to put your query in speach marks, but you can;t train your user base to do that!

Out of vuriosity, what pro video do you find your answer in. I wouldn't mind taking a look myself.

[DavidLenehan]

Thanks for the link Gary.

I watched the video on misspellings;

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seomoz-pro-video-tips

I think this would be a good way to capture variants of the part number search