SEO Recap – Misspelled Keywords

Some webmasters advocate using misspelled words to promote traffic to your website. Other webmasters denounce the practice, leading to plenty of debate on the issue. Deliberately optimizing your content for misspelled keywords may eh considered by some to be a black hat trick while others say that it is not black hat trick.

Since you would not be ticking or forcing the internet user to search using misspelled words the argument can be made that misspelled words are valid keywords used by the internet users. To put it another way, misspelled words could be considered part of the whole body of search terms that are actually input by the users even though unintentionally. There are no known Google penalties against optimizing for misspelled keywords a this time, and you can still find websites optimized for such misspelled words being listed in the top positions.

One reason why many webmasters like to take this ‘short cut’ for optimization is that the competition for misspelled keywords is lot less than the competition for correctly spelled words. Optimizing your pages for misspelled words would mean you are battling less competition. The most successful area of using misspelled keywords is brand names.

However, there are a few factors which you should take into consideration before you follow this particular path. You don’t want to destroy your website in terms of professionalism by forcing a large number of misspelled words into your website’s content, as this could come across to the users as a clear indication of lack of attention to details. You don’t want to turn of visitors by seeming to have shoddy content.  When you try to get traffic to your websites, you must also take care that your image is presented in the best possible light and that you do not look like service providers who are unintelligent or uneducated.

The best way to approach the problem is to take a page form the Google handbook. Instead of inserting misspelled keywords into your text, you can take advantage of misspellings and at the same time keep your site looking professional simply by adding pages with the misspelled words that preceded a note reading something like, “Are you looking for—-?” Users are used to this type of question as they see them in the search results page when they use wrong spellings for search.

Adding such an additional page for some of the most commonly misspelled words and directing them to the full pages of web copy with correct spelling allows you to reap the benefits of less competition without risking your website’s professionalism. It could also protect you from any possible search engine penalties that might be implemented for bad spelling on your websites to induce traffic at a later stage. By adding the types of pages described with misspelled keywords, you appear to be simply trying to help visitors who are looking for information using wrong spelling.

Google has revealed that around 10% of the visitors use misspelled words when inputting search queries. Google itself has taken to showing results for the correct spelling, but in some cases and with some search engines, you can still benefit, and even on Google as well if it only shows one or two results for the correct spelling and then your results.