Question : I wrote all the content on my website which has about 40 pages of content. I also wrote all of the meta descriptions and meta keywords tags for each page. When I did this I made sure to capitalize each word. I have been told that if the words are not capitalized I may be losing visitors who do not use capital letters while searching. Is this true?
Answer: Website owners would be better off spending their time worrying if other parts of their websites are converting surfers to buyers, than to spend a lot of time worrying about capitalizing or not capitalizing keywords in their meta tags. This is because while some search engines are no doubt case-sensitive, (which means a search for "Web Hosting" will bring up different results than a search for "web hosting"), at worst, you might miss a small percentage of the searches, and that is only IF capitalizing or not capitalizing the words in your meta tags would have made the difference between getting or not getting top rankings for the capitalized keywords in those search engines.
If there is no need to worry about the capitalization of keywords in the meta tags, should you then worry about whether or not you should be capitalizing keywords in your Title tag and your body content?
Once again, the answer is no. While the placement of keywords in your Title tag and your body content is no doubt important, what is even more important is how you convert the visitors you get into paying customers.
If you deliberately try to modify the capitalization of keywords in your content for the sole purpose of getting top rankings for some of the capitalized versions of your keywords, it is quite likely that you are going to end up making your content look unprofessional and unnatural. In the process, you are going to turn away some customers who would have otherwise bought whatever products or services you are selling from your site.
So, you are much better off using your keywords in your content the way they would appear naturally, instead of trying to decide whether each keyword should be in a lower case, or upper case, or initial caps, or mixed case, or what not.
Besides, search engines that are not case sensitive include Google, Yahoo, MSN (and AOL since AOL takes its results from Google), plus many of the other major search engines. With these engines accounting for such a large percentage of searches, worrying about capitalization is simply not worth it.
Answers by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For more advice on search engine placement, subscribe to his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by going to
www.1stSearchRanking.net