This seems to be a blog-about-web-copy week. But I came across such a good example of this recently and I have to let you know about it.
I was testing the keyword density of a client's existing site. They have a product which uses the ® symbol every time it's mentioned. Yes, every time the product is mentioned in the copy, the symbol is there.
TSDG had created the site but since that time, someone who didn't know about the web had gone into the site and closed the careful and deliberate gap between the product name and the symbol.
For this reason, the product name was no longer a keyword. Search engines would ignore that word completely. Why?
To make this clear, here's a fictional example. Imagine a food service company had a new product called Maxipies. They register the name. And they insist that every mention of Maxipies should have the registration symbol on the website. I would code it like this - Maxipies ®.
Note the space after the word and before the registration symbol. And if you read our ramblings regularly, you'll be aware of the reason for this.
You will remember that search engines ONLY see the CODE of your page. And, if the registration symbol, or any other special character, butts up to a word, then the search engines see it as one word.
In the code, a registration symbol looks like this - ® - so without the space, a search engine would read Maxipies®
No-one searching for this products is going to type 'maxipies®' into a search engine. But leave a space and the coding looks like this - Maxipies ®: - thus the word is perfectly readable and indexable (if there is such a word) by search engines.
It is the same with Maxipies™ - the word Maxipies doesn't appear on the page; what the search engines sees is Maxipies™ - so we leave a space, Maxipies ™
You know, I wonder about that well-intentioned person who closed all those spaces!
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