SEO Step By Step Guide: 9. Using Misspelled Words

In this post, let us look at the usage of misspelled words for getting traffic to your website. There is still an on going debate among the webmasters on this issue. Some feel that deliberately optimizing the content for misspelled keywords is black hat trick while others say that it is not black hat trick because they are not inducing the internet user to misspell the words. Their argument is that as we get the keywords used by the internet users, misspelled words are also part of the search terms that are actually used by the users though unintentionally. There are no known Google penalties against this however. We can indeed find a number of pages that are optimized for misspelled keywords being listed in the top positions.

One of the reasons why many webmasters like to take this short cut is that the competition for misspelled keywords is lot lesser when compared to the correctly spelled words. Therefore, if you optimize your pages for misspelled words you are obviously fighting lesser competition. The most successful area of using misspelled keywords is the brand names.

There are a few factors that you need to take into consideration before you go in for this path. First of all, how would your website fair in terms of professionalism when you happen to have a number of misspelled words in your website’s content. Would it not come across to the users as a clear indication of lack of attention to details and aversion towards perfection? Yes, it will indeed have its own share of negative impact on the users. When we try to get traffic to our websites, we should also take care that our image is guarded and that we do not look like service providers who are unrefined.

However, there are a number of ways of handling it. You can take advantage of misspellings and at the same time keep your site look professional. Number of webmasters to practice this technique. All that you need to do is to add pages with misspelled words along with the note that reads something like, “Are you looking for—-?” kind of question like the one’s we see in the search results page when we use wrong spellings to make a search. By adding this additional page for some of the most commonly misspelled words and directing them to the actual pages with correct spelling, you get to enjoy the benefit of less competition and at the same time, your website also does not lose its professional appeal. This will also protect you from any search engine penalties if at all any at a later stage. By adding these pages with misspelled keywords, you are basically trying to help visitors who are looking for information using wrong spelling. Google notes that around 10% of the visitors use misspelled words while making their searches. Some of them due to typos and some due to poor spelling skills. As long as you are not compromising the professional feel of your website, you should be able to benefit from the misspelled words.

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