SEO and Slavic characters

[THor]

Hey!
I regularly visit your page and is awesome!

But now I have a question about SEO that I haven’t found on any other SEO pages and I hope that you can help me.
I’m from Slovenia and here comes the problem. In our alphabet we have Slavic characters with circumflex. And when you want to test you site on some SEO online tools you get a lot of errors because of these letters. And now I’m wondering if this is also somehow related with SEO? Does this have any influence on positioning your page search engines? Should I use Unicode ( & #269; & #353; & #382; ) characters instead of these letters?

Thank you :)

[Phoenix]

Thor,

The SEO keyword suggestion tools will always error when trying to use foreign character such as slavic ones. Its not an SEO problem. They are setup to read basic english, as characters not represented in english will cause problems as they can't interpret relations between common phrases. Plus its a very complicated programming task to build a tool which can relate all the characters and inflexions correctly, which is why not many exist.

I would recommend checking out an article I wrote on the subject. From the links there you might be able to find a tool that can assist in your search.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/000964.html

[Phoenix]

I also wanted to add, since I have some experience with it that you should use unicode characters when optimizing for slavic words. You can use these in the title and regular body of the page for proper translation. I would also recommend using the versions of the word without the unicode characters as some people may not search with those special characters.