Keywords with accents

[Mecanografia]

Hi,

We are running a website in Spain to teach touch typing to children (www.mecanografia.com). Our main keyword is mecanografia (touch typing in Spanish) which is official written with an accent on the i.

Our SEOMOZ on page optimization report was initially an F because we set the keyword mecanografia without an accent and on the page we use the grammatically correct version with an accent on the i. Once we added the keyword with accent to SEOMOZ our rapport was upgraded to an A.

Our question is: how does Google treat accents. Is it necessary to optimize for words with and without accent or does one version suffice. Users search about 50% of the time without using the accent.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[alholliman]

Hi,

I think that accents do matter and can have a significant effect on rankings.

I would suggest that you optimise different pages of your site for different variotions of the keyword (for example one with accent and one without accent), where the original content is a good fit for the keyword.

This will then mean that you can broaden the range of keywords you rank for,

Hope that helps,

Alex