Foreign characters in metatags

[NickD]

Hi

I sell wine online and want to be able to include in the metatags section keywords which include foreign characters, as these are place names in France. No problem doing this through the "Page Properties" screen for the home page, and when viewed here the characters are all displayed correctly. However, when I look at my page online, using IE5, and using "View->Source", the keywords become garbled...

e.g. "Māconnais" becomes "Mâconnais"

and I guess the search engines won't like that too much.

Anyone know a fix? Or in fact will the search engines ignore foreign chars, treating "é" like "e", meaning that I can just enter everything with standard characters with no accents?

All input much appreciated.

Regards

Nick Dobson

[NickD]

Now this is interesting - because when I view my initial posting, the garbled version of "Māconnais" looks ungarbled on the display of the posting.

It actually looks like ""M & # 2 2 6 ; c on n a i s"" in IE5.

Nick

[cdicken]

Nick

All I can suggest is using the western forms of any special French characters (i.e. Maconnais).

I imagine that when people search in search engines, they will enter easily accessible characters rather than tricky french characters. Certainly I would. Bear in mind as well that all the biggest search engines are American...