Hi, Has anyone heard anything about how many people actually click on the results that come up from a misspelled keyword? I've noticed that google, yahoo, msn, ask and aol all catch the misspelling and offer the proper spelling as a link at the top. It wouldn't be worthwhile to optimize for misspelled terms even if they were getting a lot of searches if people just notice that they made a spelling mistake and click on the proper spelling. Maybe some of you have ranked high for a misspelled term and can let me know whether it brought you any traffic. Thanks.
yep, misspelled term bring traffic. but sure not equal to that of correct spelled. I find it a good trick, although I don't recommend it as it gives bad impression on those who know the correct spelling and those whom come to know correct spelling later.
There's definately traffic there, I've recieved hits on misspelt terms when I've only had one misspelling on the page. In that context the traffic is just as good as regular traffic. There's some very common misspellings that probably have more traffic than others, but I wouldn't optimise for misspellings on purpose.
mis-spelled word is huge source of traffic, we do add up mis-spelled words in our ppc campain. they can help you a great deal. but if you are doing it for seo optimisation better check out wether its allowed or not, optimizing a page with a miss-spelled word is fine if you are fetching decent amount of traffic through but they can atleast drive you the quality but one can't gurantee the quantity.
take a note of this example from Alliance & Leicester - http://www.alliance-leicester.co.uk/mortgage-information/alliance-leicester-misspellings.htm this is a great example.
Personally, I would be quite reluctant to deliberately misspell words on my website's pages. It gives a very unprofessional look to the page. If you intend to deliberately use some misspellings, here's a possible solution, based on the belief held by most that the anchor text on inbound links counts as text on the page receiving the link. Put some of the frequently misspelled words into the anchor text that you use in directory submissions (for example, "snoboard" instead of "snowboard" or "googel" instead of "google"). That way the misspellings "snoboard" or "googel" will not show to the reader of your page, but they will show to the search engines. Two clarifications: (1) I don't use this procedure, and (2) I'm not sure if it would be considered "black hat" SEO. Does anyone know if this technique would be "black hat" (and therefore to be scrupulously avoided)? If not, then it makes good SEO sense and it won't take anything away from the professionalism of your website's pages in the eyes of the reader.
Thanks for all the tips. Putting a misspelling in some anchor text sounds like a good way to keep them off the page. I also like the example of Alliance & Leicester. They wrote an article about common misspellings and that article page comes up #1 if you enter those misspellings in Google. That seems like a very honest and straight-forward approach. The meta keywords tag is also a good place for misspellings since yahoo will check the meta keywords tag to see if a page should be ranked for a certain term although it won't affect where in the SERPs the page will be. There's some speculation that Google may look at it for some reason and I'm not sure about MSN.
Just my personal opinion on this, I don't see accounting for misspellings as a "black hat" technique. "Black hat" to me means deceptive or unfair, and I don't think that accounting for misspellings qualifies as either. It's simply a way of guiding visitors to what they're really looking for - not tricking them into going somewhere they don't want to go. Sam
Yes, there are quite a number of people searching for wrongly spelled words or localized spellings (harbor vs harbour, organization vs organisation) but it does not mean putting them in your page will get you substantial traffic. While I don't see doing misspellings on pages as black hat approach, I consider a page very unprofessional to have misspelled words. We have copy writers and editors to ensure that our message is sent across, along with correct grammar and spelling. Besides, Google, MSN and Yahoo! will always suggest the correct spelling if a search query includes misspelled words.
From my experience there are many people who click on the results that come from misspelled keywords. Possibly, they are just feeling lucky
misspellings work very well in ppc campaigns, in my experience. but to optimize a page for them... wouldn't that make the page seem sloppy?
I used to target mis-spellings and the A&L example is exactly how I done it. Used to work well too until Google came along with it's "Did you mean....." Spoil sports ;-)
I still think the A&L approach is viable, even if the SEs now suggest correct spellings. I think it's possible that people overlook the suggestion, and for those that are really bad spellers, they may be thinking "No...that's not what I meant". Sam
It's not unprofessional if it's done in the way that A&L did it. Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Ask and Aol all offer suggestions for the correct spelling. That's what prompted me to start this thread and it appears that in spite of the suggestions people are still getting good traffic based on misspelled terms.
But that's a misspelling of a company name and not generic keywords. Taking the A & L example, if we use a misspelling of their products and services (mortages for mortgages or invesments for investments) the page would really look sloppy. You can't expect search engines to provide a spelling suggestion for all misspellings.
You don't have to put the misspelled keywords in your page description in order to well rank for them. There are a few tricks that are completly "white hat" and are super easy to do. They work well because 99.9% of people don't optimize a web page for misspelled keywords. Yes, it brings good traffic if you know what words to target.
This is another reason why it is nice to have visitors add content to your site (ie product reviews, blog comments, forums, etc.). Sure, it looks bad to inject mispelled words into your actual site copy, but that is not the case when your visitors commit the same error. Plus, you don't have to guess which keywords people will commonly misspell.
For anyone looking for common misspellings, 'Good Keywords' (www.goodkeywords.com) has a Misspelled Words feature that provides 'em. I usually take this list and dump it into the AdWords Traffic Estimator, and then include only the misspellings that advertisers are bidding on. HTH, Sam
Hi guys, well this is a very interesting post especially when i found this site by looking at misspelled world. i have looked different ways of optimising traffic to our site, which is quite lame as it is just a hobby and I’m no professional. Dare i say our site is geared to offer information on Mesothelioma a word which most people can't pronounce let alone spell and a word which thanks to this site i have found was once one of the highest paid for ads. Well I typed in MesAthelioma a common misspelling into google, which incidentally wasn't corrected by google and i was directed to this forum, which i am glad of, as there does seem to be a lot beneficial information here for me, once i get my head round all the info For us misspelling mesothelioma is something of a necessity to insure those suffering from the disease stand a better chance of ending up on site which offers information and support and is not landed on the door step of some unscrupulous lawyers who do use misspelling of words and legal terminology purposely.