Turns out, people make a lot of spelling mistakes in my forum which in turn drive a lot of traffic to my site. Whenever I write an article I usually run a spellchecker, but I am wondering if that is really the best thing to do.
That is interesting. I don't know that I could deliberately make spelling mistakes - or even stop myself from correcting my errors. I think i must be slightly obsessive compulsive or something. I think that as the forum owner I should have good grammar and spelling - but maybe I should consider removing the spellcheck option from the forum...
Hmm, maybe replace spellchecker with a thesaurus option - we'll be bringing them in by the thousands.. lol
Spelling errors do bring in a traffic to a site. Thats why, as an SEO, you'll also learn to optimize a site for spelling variations for different words. Tools like Wordtracker and Google suggestion tool also provide spelling variations when you decide your keywords.
I have used spelling mistakes for years. Started off unitentionally but it does work. How many times have you made a spelling error in a search engine. I do it all the time! Roger
Yeah I do too, a keyword suggestion tool that factored in common mispellings would be incredibly interesting and useful.
I've got a site that capitalizes on this sort of thing, but with eBay auctions... I get people finding the site all day long with misspellings... for example, "thunderbrid", "sunglasess", "kamera", "camshat", "convertilbe", "automoble", etc. Works out good for me. ;-) BTW, it's the site in my sig below.
Well, it is way easier to rank for spelling-mistakes (obviously), but the chances of ranking for the main keyword is less when there are too many spelling mistakes on the page. Also google suggests the correct spelling, so people are very likely to go to the SERPS for the correct spelling anyhow. I think this issue is less prominent in SEO then it was a few years ago. But perhaps, when you have a website with few visitors (not my problem ) it's a good idea to aim at spelling mistakes too. So personally I do check my spelling to correct it - but I do add some common variations of the misspelled word to the keywords-tage - when I add one, that is. In e-bay and amazon I think aiming for misspellings is the best way to go - there is no automated correction and the competition for that product is going to be soo much less.
Mistakes do bring traffic but when I search myself and make a spelling mistake I will see it and will not click on the result shown... I don't know how other treat spelling stuff... p.l.u.r.
Um. I guess I didn't make my post too clear. LOL. After reading it again I can see what was the source of confusion. I merely noticed all the spelling mistakes are driving traffic and I was wondering if I should STOP using a spellchecker to allow some mistakes of my own to float into my articles. I wasn't actually talking about deliberately adding some. I would be too worrried about credibility of my site if it is full of obvious mistakes Until now I have always corrected my articles through Word to make them as good as possible, but the ones with mistakes (forum posts mostly) bring more search traffic.
I had a page that was doing well for both the correct spelling and the mispelling of a particular phrase. When I finally got around to correcting my boo-boo, I first checked the search engines and my logs. I realized that not only should I keep the mispelling, but I actually built a paragraph around it where I talked about how the word is tricky to spell and many non-native English speakers spell it wrong. I got to optimize for the mispelling, share information, and ensure that anyone knowing how to spell the word realizes that the "mistake" was purely intentional.
Working on wrong spellings is definitely a part of SEO. You should always update your articles to have the right/proper spelling because the reader wouldn't like to read erroneous verbage. So don't stop using your spellchecker. You should figure out a proper white-hat technique to list for these keywords (yea - mispelled words are KWs too). Or a bit of black-hat might work too if you add verbage at the bottom of your page with mis-spelled words - not good or suggested.