Keywords are typically two to five word phrases you expect people to search for to find your website, right? Keywords are phrases you want your website to be found under. Keywords are not about what you call your stuff. Keywords are what you think other average surfer (or your prospective site visitors) may type in a search box. Well, not everyone is perfect. From time to time, users also get wrong in typing the keywords for the topic they are looking for. A user sometime tends to type misspelled keywords in the search bar and is not aware of what he/she is typing at. Also, every user does not want to look for the wrong item or wrong keywords, right?
As a site owner, what can you do with it? You usually do not want to use misspelled keywords in your body or page title as they will look somewhat unprofessional. It can however help you to add misspelled keywords to the meta keywords tag.
When searching for misspelled keywords, some search engines use “Did you mean…” pages, focusing the page title and heading tag on the misspelled versions of the keyword. Search spelling correction will get more sophisticated over time. Search engines want to correct for misspellings in the search results pages before the users get to your site. I have read an article which one search engine product manager who stated that misspellings can flag pages for relevancy reviews and usually misspellings for SEO are not recommended for most websites. If you are using throw away domains then misspellings might help you get some targeted traffic without using as much effort. Also if you have a community driven site it will naturally include many misspellings from various bad spelling authors.
As a site owner, what can you do with it? You usually do not want to use misspelled keywords in your body or page title as they will look somewhat unprofessional. It can however help you to add misspelled keywords to the meta keywords tag.
When searching for misspelled keywords, some search engines use “Did you mean…” pages, focusing the page title and heading tag on the misspelled versions of the keyword. Search spelling correction will get more sophisticated over time. Search engines want to correct for misspellings in the search results pages before the users get to your site. I have read an article which one search engine product manager who stated that misspellings can flag pages for relevancy reviews and usually misspellings for SEO are not recommended for most websites. If you are using throw away domains then misspellings might help you get some targeted traffic without using as much effort. Also if you have a community driven site it will naturally include many misspellings from various bad spelling authors.
5 comments:
My last blog post was inspired by macuha :)
I wonder, what happens with alternative spellings or international spelling standards (e.g. British or Canadian English vs. American)? I can understand that search engines are looking for intentional misspellings that can be used by splogs & spammers, and that gang. It does leave one wondering, however, what to do in these odd circumstances.....
Thanks for your post!
Ruby in Montreal
Good info. I never use mispellings (on purpose) in my sites.
Unfortunately meta keywords is ignored by Google so it makes little sense putting misspelled content there.
I've seen many examples of people playing the misspelling game, i.e. "mesenger" instead of "messenger". The misspelling is put in the URL and in the title tag, without a problem. Some of them even make money!
yes, i agree with you ismael, some did it on purpose. They did it just to have traffic. The samples are video=vedio, youtube=yuotube, google=googel, something like that and they are good at it.
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