SEO for common misspelling of our company name

[Clay Wimberley]

The name of my company is "wimberley" many people commonly missspell it as "wimberly" when they search for us or our products. We currently have our name misspelled as "wimberly" for the title of many of our web pages (including the index page). I don't know if that was a mistake or a strategic move my our web designer. I guess because of this misspelled title, we come up really well under searched for "wimberly". How can i maintain our search engine status with out having the unprofessional looking misspelled title show up. can i make the title longer and put the misspelled version at the end? Currently, other than the page titles and the meta tags, we don't have the misspelled version of our name anywhere on the site. We probably do have a lot of external links with our name misspelled pointing to our site. Could that be helping us too?

[martinibuster]

We probably do have a lot of external links with our name misspelled pointing to our site. Could that be helping us too?

Yup.

[pleeker]

can i make the title longer and put the misspelled version at the end?

We did that for a client in a similar situation. We also put a line in the "Description" meta tag saying "The correct spelling of our company name is ________, not __________." That's the last line of the Description.

[PatrickDeese]

You might consider an AdWords/Oveture PPC campaign for you mispelling - you'd be surpised how much traffic that will bring.

[Clay Wimberley]

Much Thanks for everyone's help. I'm assuming that inbound anchor text increases page relavence and not just page rank. is that correct? would it be worthwhile to have internal links with our name misspelled? are internal links weighted less than external? I'm assuming so.

[pleeker]

would it be worthwhile to have internal links with our name misspelled?

You mean, have a link(s) from page A on your site to page B on your site with the name of your company misspelled?

Regardless of PageRank transfer, that would make you look really, really dumb. :)

[Clay Wimberley]

yes that would make us look dumb, but i'm sure there would be a way to make it o.k. with some sort of "...Wimberley, not Wimberly" sentence. Just a thought.