punctuation question

[comeoutontop]

Ok, so what happens when you have a keyword that can be spelled many different ways? For instance, my keyword on this new page: www.gotostbarths.com/home/home.hml is going to be St. Barth's. This is a destination portal site.

Here is the challenge. The destination can be spelled with/without punctuation, with/without spelling out Saint, with/without the "t". Should I just use them all in my keywords or ? And, of course, the french type it st-barths with a hyphen, so I have to include that one, too. Egads.

Should I use one spelling in the document and another in the alt text? Should I spell it in all different ways on the pages? I'd rather just pick one spelling/way to write it and stick with that, but I'm a bit worried we'll miss folks...

Advice?

[jocelyn]

[QUOTE=comeoutontop]... but I'm a bit worried we'll miss folks...[/QUOTE]
Yep... just like the e and é, è, ë... in french. If you search for both, the serps are not the same. So you'll miss dudes if you don't use many versions on one page, or make more page to accomodate all the versions...

[seo guy]

What I would do is stay consistant on one page for one usage, then on another page choose an alternate targeting the demographic for that group.

For instance writing an article about how "st-barths" appeals to the french would be how I used that particular vatiationm whereas for the main page, I would go for the variation with the most searches to please the masses

[baggiho]

How to type french?

[jocelyn]

[QUOTE=baggiho]How to type french?[/QUOTE]
What do you mean? Like how to use the é like in téléchargement ?

When I was computer technician, most people were using english windows (like I do). I use the ALT codes for this, since they are available on any windows. ALT130 on the numeric pad will give the é, ALT135 will give the ç ...

[rizla]

there are unicode fonts that can be used with multiple languages - this is an example of encoding use on a site containing 5 languages -
charset=iso-8859-8-i for english. french, hebrew and german + UTF8 for russian:

(the site is not optimised) http://www.oranit-ltd.com

[baggiho]

:D Thank you.
I can type it

[bobmutch]

comeoutontop: Check out what Overture PPC shows as being searched with the Search Term Suggestion Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) and also you may want to do Google's PPC for a month on St Barts, St. Barts, St Barths, Saint Barth, Saint Barthelemy, St Barthelemy to see what kind of searches are being done.
I didn't find any difference between st barts and st. barts in Google, Yahoo or MSN. I even tried st mary and st. mary. There is a difference between st barth and st-barth.