Thanks Per.

Another question arose while I was scribbling down some possible keywords. I'm in the UK, and some words are spelt slightly different to our American cousins. Should I use one over the other, use both varients as keywords, or is localisation not really an issue?

I'm England, I always use American spelling, yeah now I can speak Americano blue jeans and chinos the web is designed for American speech eg centre to center it's OK you WILL still be able to spell properly even after many years of being bi-lingual :lol:You see things like Google will see your spelling as American, that's what I would do anyway.

I am not sure if it would make any difference, but if I were you I'd stick with consistent UK spelling. I suspect that the search engines have the common US-UK differences built in by now and will treat them as equivalents.
If you have the time, you could always do some test searches using UK spelling in search words and compare results with searches using US spelling . I suspect they would come out about the same.

Unless things have really changed on that and granted they may have, this I thought was helpful http://antezeta.com/news/search-engines … te-content but I personally would always use US spelling

A more relevant take on this may be to identify your target audience. If the target audience is in the UK (or in India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, ....), I would definitely use UK spelling. If, however, your target audience is in the US, you may have an advantage using US spelling.

The fact that "my favorite color" gives about 600 million hits while "my favourite colour" gives *only* 32 million hits, may be a bit irrelevant, since it's usually only the first 20-30 hits that really count or, at most, the first 100...

The other thing to keep in mind is that the key words listed in the <meta> tag should be consistent with the page text - including the alt text.
So, if you are in the UK and your page text is UK English (and your target audience is primarily in the UK), I would still use UK spelling for key words .

It's going to be a UK orientated site, so I'll stick with that. I was wondering if I could use International English for the main text and US English for the keywords, but you pre-empted my question.

Thanks again guys, and thanks for the quick replies.

I know quite a few people who really get annoyed at the way Americans spell, of course they must have nothing else in their life to get annoyed at but I actually like it, it's nice and lazy as in humour - humor, colour - color, I'm all for cutting down on spelling when I don't have to One thing that is a bit annoying is when your typing something out and it comes up as a spelling mistake and it's the way we spell it here.

We're not lazy. We're simply suffering a multi-century shortage of vowels.