: How does SEO work for "non standard" languages? I couldn't find a better word than "non standard" to describe my native language. It is quite an old language and it is spoken by around seven
I couldn't find a better word than "non standard" to describe my native language. It is quite an old language and it is spoken by around seven million people.
The problem is that most of the people don't write it correctly. For example: the standard word for "song" is "këngë" and this is how it is written in the school books and in any other serious printed book. However, the average speaker would very rarely use the word "këngë" for daily use. For instance, if we assume 100 people would want to search for "këngë" on Google. I would say not more than one out of 100 would type "këngë". And around 80% of them would type "keng".
So, the question is: if I have a blog where I am talking about songs, and I write the word song as "këngë" in my content, would I attract users that are searching for "keng"?
A local Google for my language does exists (google.al) if that helps.
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I don't speak Albanian, but I ran a little test on google.al. When I type keng in the search box, it offered me kenge and keng popullore in the drop box.
keng popullore returns many music videos and some include the këngë spelling in their title.
This confirms what I thought. Google can deal with incorrect spellings in your language. If I were you, I would stick to the correct spelling.
Depending on what your site is about, you might want to consider building a glossary section for at least your most common keywords. You could then link to and from this content silo. This way, you'll garner traffic from both and it wouldn't be spammy because you're educating or clarifying terminology.
For example:
Official Term
Common Term
Definition
Sentence Example
Link to site content around this term
You should always use the correct spelling and punctuation for the target language. From there define the correct language hinting in the meta tags on your page. Also if you are concerned about common misspellings you can also reference those in the meta tags in the header.
Modern search engines such as Google interpret misspellings and based on context will offer up results in the correct spelling. Meaning if you are at Google.al and type "keng", depending on context Google will know you probably meant "këngë".
eg, using English:
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en" />
<meta http-equiv="language" content="en" />
<meta name="description" content="brief description text that might have alternate spellings, punctuation is ok here." />
<meta name="keywords" content="list of critical keywords including correctly and incorrectly spelled variants, with and without diacritics Don't just load this with everything, no punctuation except comma separators." />
Mixing spellings in and out of tags/cross tags as suggested in a comment to the OP can actually dilute your content and risks being identified as misleading. Don't do that.
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