Search Engine Optimisation or Optimization?
This is a pet peeve of mine. The substitution of S for Z in Australian English. I was told by a producer from the Australian Broadcasting Commission that either was acceptable. I would disagree as I see it as the Americanisation (see what I did there) of Australian English. As we use more and more cloud services we are constantly bombarded by US standards. Take Google calendar for instance, even if you have your local time zone you still have an American date format. The same applies to other Google services like Webmaster tools and Analytics. This creates an interesting dilemma for keyword targeting.
Do you Optimise or Optimize?
What keywords should you focus on? With an S or with a Z. Some will tell you it doesn’t matter, that Google understands the difference. That is only half right. For instance we rank no.1 for Search Engine Optimisation Melbourne but no.3 for the same phrase with a z. So there is a difference. Similarly we are on the 1st page of results for Search Engine Optimisation but don’t appear anywhere for Search Engine Optimization. This is when I head across to Google Trends.
Over time you can see that Optimization has a lot more searches but this graph is for searches worldwide. When we look at Australian only searches the results are very different.
Based on the data above though I’m still missing out on around 20% of the total search volume. I wouldn’t necessarily advocate you use both Z & S on your site as Google may see that as a quality issue but it does demonstrate that one simple letter in a word does make a big difference and for the most part Google does not understand.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
