Misspelled Content

Whenever I first got into search engine optimization years back people would commonly try and spam misspellings of common keywords or popular names in order to pick up easy clicks without as much competition. Reason being is while MTV and Eonline are spelling Britney Spears correctly they're not ever mentioning the common misspelling of Brittany Spears so this leaves that area of competition available to low level competition. Effectively you get the same valuable visitors but without dealing with authority sites.

While I did endeavour to pick up some useful misspellings through clever drops I thought of it as more devious than useful but lately I've come to think that natural type is more useful to the web than previously. Reason being was found in examining the logs of this very website where I observed picking up search engine traffic from people who obviously just missed a keystroke when typing. Curious on how they reached me I traced the searches and found that I'd missed a keystroke when developing the web page in question.

My typo had created a page that ranked high for a subject but misspelled and quite a few people were reaching it. Completely accidental and occuring only once in the document but it took people from Google or Yahoo and set them on the right path. I'd accidentally improved the user experience because I refuse to use a spell checker other than my eyes when writing content for my website.

I'm not saying that everyone should put away their spell check because by all means thats what helps us produce professional grade content for our business websites. People lose money on sites such as ebay when they misspell a listing because people can't locate it. I'm just saying that natural documents do in some instances help with the quality of search results. They help people find what they're looking for and sometimes we start looking with very little idea of what we're after.(including how to spell it)

Just a thought..

Jerry Wayne Odom Jr. 3/20/2006 Misspelled Content Keywords Research

• Overture Suggestions tool - One of the oldest keyword checkers on the web provided by Overture thats now owned by Yahoo. For example you could type in "spears" and see all the different ways people spell that poor girls first name. Useful for finding misspellings with 2 or more words but not 1 word. For that you should just use a search engine such as Google and examine the number of times articles come back for a certain spelling.
• Word Tracker - Another old keyword service tool that I always found useful.
• Google's Keyword Tool - Provided for their ad partners and useful. They're the biggest name in search.