This meta tag will tell browsers and search engines that the page contains "special" European characters. This will save you from using the Ü notation.

Nonetheless, my suggestion is to use your first AND second suggestions, i.e. to use two keywords. That's my approach to it, and I works fine.

Some more reading material:
"Für alle CONTENT-Angaben gilt, daß mit Sonderzeichen (z.B. deutsche Umlaute) sparsam umgegangen werden sollte. Es ist aber anscheinend vorteilhafter, z.B. ein "ü" zu benutzen als die im
normalen Text übliche Umschreibung mit ü oder ü. Zusammengesetzte Umlaute (z.B. ue) sollten nur verwendet werden, wenn diese Schreibweise auch gebräuchlich ist." (First ref. below).

I do agree with the first statement, preferring ü to ü, but the second is ignoring the fact that there will be users who don't have an ü on their keyboard. These users typically type ue instead of ü, and this is something search engines don't recognize. Hence my approach to use both keywords.



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Note added at 2002-06-28 11:51:46 (GMT)
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Well, I should have known better. Of course, the meta tag in the suggestion got swallowed, so here it is without \'<\' and \'>\' ...

META HTTP-EQUIV=\"Content-Type\" CONTENT=\"text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1\"

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Note added at 2002-06-28 12:57:52 (GMT)
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Which will be read by German bots? All three of them:
I find it hard to imagine a German programmer (or a programmer explitely writing a bot for German web pages) could ignore umlauts.

The second version won\'t be recognized as umlaut, but should be used (in addition to the ü, i.e. übersetzen and uebersetzen) to cover potential user input.

The ü is part of the HTML standard, so one should expect this to be implemented. However, since the ü notation is geared towards browsers, not robots, I\'m tempted to think this may not be implemtend to the same extent as the \"ü\".

HTH

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Note added at 2002-06-28 14:28:24 (GMT)
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Just found this document, supporting my approach : http://www.suse.com/us/support/howto/htdig/. (under \"locale\"). This is a description of a search engine for intranets, but the general concept should apply to any search engine. Define the language or code page correctly, and the search engine will recognize it...