I have been tracking the keywords people are using to find my website through PPC for the past 6 months. I am looking at the actual referral URL, not the keyword that it matched on. After reviewing the list, I noticed that there are at least 30 common misspellings for one of my most important phrases. I would like to optimize for all of these keyword misspellings on my e-commerce site. However, I don't want our customers seeing misspellings all over the place. I have put some of them in my keyword metatags already, but this alone isn't enough to get ranked very highly for them. I have been thinking about adding a section for "keywords" that displays a list of 10-15 keywords for each product page and mixing in the misspellings with the proper spellings. What I am wondering is, is this something that the search engines will penelize me for later? I noticed that Amazon.com uses a similar tactic (but not for misspellings), they just call them "tags" instead of "keywords".
You want to avoid misspellings on the page as you said, it is just tacky and unprofessional. It is a good start putting them in your keywords tag, that is really all that meta tag is good for anyway. I like to use misspellings in PPC campaigns as well. If you have a reviews section, perhaps you can use these common misspellings cleverly placed in a review, or in a user-feedback section.
While I agree with you that putting misspellings directly in the content is both tacky and unprofessional, at least one of my competitors has resorted to this approach - and I am pretty sure it was intentional. PM me if you want to take a look at his site, but I am not going to advertise for him here! I like your reviews idea, but although it is in the plan for the future, we won't have a review section in this next release. I am also already using all of the misspellings I could find in PPC. However, because some of the big players in the industry I am in made a habit of making misspellings of the product into brand names, I believe as many as 5-10% of all of the searches for the product are misspelled. It also means that it is not a slam dunk to get to the top of the search for the misspelling because there are many sites that include these misspellings. As I mentioned before - just putting them into the metatags is not enough to optimize for them. This is why I was thinking about putting a seperate "keywords" section on my product page near the bottom. If most people read web pages the way I do, the keywords section will be ignored by most users anyway. While putting them into a paragraph of text that a user is likely to read will be annoying to the user, putting them in a section by themselves might not be - especially if they are buried between properly spelled keywords. I guess another option would be to put the misspellings into image "alt" tags, but they would still be visible (and perhaps annoying) to users of IE. I was just wondering if the search engines frown on this because although I am targeting seaches for the exact product, the terms don't exactly match. Would this be considered spaming?