As internet and search engine users, we have all been in the situation many times when we type in a search phrase and accidently misspell it. Within Google in particular, we usually find that the search engine corrects our search for us and offers us the results for the search phrase which it believes is the correct one. Whilst this is a good thing in most cases for websites, search results and human users, it does prove one vital thing – Google knows how to spell.
Take a look at this from a web optimiser or SEO link building point of view and it will open up a whole new can of worms regarding online content, keyword creation and links to your website. The confusing thing is that there are perfectly acceptable and understandable theories behind both spelling something incorrectly and spelling it correctly when it comes to search engine optimisation.
To understand this further, start by looking at it from a web copywriter’s point of view. The reason you hire professional search engine optimisations services for content writing is because they are creative, accurate, strong in their grammatical abilities and pay good attention to detail. The main body of your content within your web pages should be interesting, enticing and definitely grammatically correct. Spelling mistakes within the main content on your website looks terrible from a human user’s point of view, particularly within blogs and news pages. For this reason it is crucial that the spelling within all aspects of your site is correct.
As far as online searches go however, there is actually a strong argument for using words which are spelt incorrectly. The main reason for this is that a proportion of human searches spell words incorrectly within their search. Whether this is down to accidentally hitting the wrong key or just not knowing how to spell the word, it is still happening. From a company perspective this can be extremely interesting and can help to get you a higher page ranking if handled correctly.
Most companies will know if their keywords are difficult to spell or are the type of word that is frequently misspelt by users. Including these misspelt words as some of your keywords can mean that your site ranks high within searches which are also spelt incorrectly. The other benefit to this is that keywords which are spelt incorrectly are likely to be less competitive, as the majority of websites within the same industry will spell them the correct way. There are of course downsides to this, the first one being that you are relying on user searches to be spelt incorrectly in the exact same way your words are, and secondly, if Google is automatically correcting spelling and overriding the original user search, then the whole process is irrelevant.
Using the odd misspelling can work, as long as you know it is commonly misspelt a certain way. As of yet there are no known ranking penalties for purposefully misspelling, however it is important you do not jeopardise your website reputation in favour of one page ranking.
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Posted by Phil.
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