Can you believe it? Caps again

Why the fork image? It's probably something to do with the first and last letters of the word.

Yes, I am feeling this way because once again, I have to address the issue of erroneously capitalizing the initial letters of words. We all know that this is ungrammatical and that it looks ridiculous but it also has ramifications for search engines. Why? Here goes.

Think about it ...
Burgundy is a region in France; burgundy is a color.
A Swede is a person from Sweden; a swede is a vegetable.
Labrador is a region in Canada; a labrador is a dog.
A Hamburger is a native of Hamburg; hamburger is the minced gristle you see at supermarkets.
Tim Curry is an actor; a curry is an Indian meal.
A chap might be called Mr Baker; a baker is a chap who makes bread.

You can no doubt think of hundreds of other examples. So, let's put this simply and say that I find myself in Labrador, Canada, and I want an Indian meal - a curry. So I go to a search engines and search for Labrador curry. Within seconds, the results give me details of Indian restaurants in Labrador. If I search for labrador Curry I might well get details about an actor's dog. This is bad if you are an Indian restaurant in Labrador and insist on capitalizing the word curry (for whatever reason, but people DO that!)

When I was at school, among my teachers were Miss Hand, Miss Rainbow, Miss Onions and Mrs White. As you see from the examples above, it is the capital initial which tells me that Hand is a name and hand is a body part.

A search engine is a simple creature. In effect, it is a computer program. You know how pedantic computers are. They are not subject to human error. (If a computer "makes a mistake" that is because of the human operating it, or a human programming error).

So, a computer program (the search engine spider) reviews a website. It sees the word Labrador and classifies the site in the Canada file. It sees the word labrador and the site goes into the dog file. This is an over-simplification, of course, but that capital initial is the ONLY way a search engine spider can tell the difference between Burgundy and burgundy. Yes, it's a lot more complex and the rekaining words on the page and their keyword density also help the spiders to classify the site but don't think that your erroneous caitalizations don't matter because the most certainly do.

And what about those people who write some words in all caps? The spider sees that the most prominent word on a site is LABRADOR - what is that site about?