SEO and misspelled words, benefit or not?
The proper spelling of words is an issue in SEO circles. One side of the discussion
says that by using spells which have been improperly spelled, a site can gain ranking
AND visitors by being the only site to anticipate people who accidentally use the
wrong spelling in a search query. This is completely true, and your site could gain a
large number of visitors by allowing for the misspelling of common words, or the
transposition of letters, such as “ng” being transposed into “gn” (a very common typing
error).
But before you go running off to change “winning” into “winnign”, let’s take a moment
to consider how it could also adversely affect the site. First, and most obviously, your
site loses apparent “IQ” points. Even those who found your site with the incorrect
spelling realize as soon as they see the word in use that it is wrong. For some fields,
this is of little consequence, but in other fields, such an error could mean that you gain
more visitors, but at a cost of losing out on a higher number of sales. Not to mention
the damage that such intentional misuse of the language could potentially cause to the
language itself over time, in the event that such language abuse on the world wide web
became standard practice.
If your site is a professional storefront, or offers technical services, it is best to assume
that visitors are judging your ability to communicate properly by how you are
represented on the site. Does anyone hope to hire a lawyer who is adept at the
practice of “lwa”? Are families going to contact an excellent English “tutro”? Probably
not. On the other hand, it is common for a plumber to be called a plummer, and if
such a spelling could be used as a keyword for the site, it would surely gain business
from people who want to get a leak fixed, not consult a dictionary.
Which words to misspell, and when to use them is a difficult decision. If you only want
visitors to the site, and measure your success in how well you rank, then misspellings
could be your key to PR10 for “wether” instead of “weather”. If your target audience
expects you to be more linguistic and literate, it is probably a bad idea to intentionally
seed wrongly spelled words in the site content. Should you decide use this method, do
so sparingly, as this trick (for “trick” is exactly what this is) could be as detrimental as it
could be helpful.
Article written by SEOnotepad.com
1 Comment Received
August 16th, 2008 @12:38 pm
Rightly said, but as has been seen many a times that the major company always buys out the other domain, in order to safeguard its users. For example google also owns gooogle.com, so even if you misspell you are redirected to the main website. But this is a good strategy and if used properly can garner quite a decent traffic, and earnings. Moreover Such traffic needs no source as it hits accidentally. In my view such websites can be monetized easily with a similar topic to the ‘correctly spelled’ website.
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