Synonyms and Abbreviations

Optimize for multiple keywords spellings?

[persepee]

Hi,

I have been visiting this forum for a while now but this my first posting.

Anyway, I'm currently working on a site in which my main keyword has six different spellings, if you count all the synonyms and abbreviations. This has proved to be a big problem for me since the top the three spellings seem to be almost equally common and I have not even considered thinking of mispelling yet. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to optimize a page for multiple spellings of a keyword?

A friend suggested doing a funny article about all the different ways to spell this keyword which I don't believe is a bad idea but it's going to be very difficult to fit six version of each keyphrase into one article when you consider that I am trying to capture about twenty different keyphrases. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

-P

[jatar_k]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld persepee,

what about extending your 'funny article' into multiple pages and try concentrating each page on the origin and reasons behind the particular misspelling?

then you are only really optimizing one page per term and you can have some nice internal links to those definitions? You could use it as a type of glossary of terms.

[Pradeep]

If you want to target the mis spellings, then either you insert your mis spelling in title tag or if you simply insert in first paragraph (in first 5 lines) you can expect a better ranking for mis spellings.

Pradeep SV

[persepee]

Thanks for the replies. I will have to give it some thought.

[moe2000]

Remember though that most engine have a spell checker that greatly lessens the impact of targeting misspellings.

[persepee]

I am talking about synonyms and abbreviations though, not misspellings. I know a lot of people target misspelling but, for the reason you just mentioned, I don't really bother with doing that too much.

Personally, I believe search engines should automatically return synonyms, such as color and colour, when you search but that is not the case.

I think I am just going to add a keyword field at the bottle of each page with each synonym and abbreviation but I doubt it will help much since they will just appear once at the bottom of a (on average) four page article.

[Woz]

Put together a glossary of terms used in relation to your subject area including the abbreviation and acronyms. If you build index pages per letter, and, where appropriate, dedicated p[ages per term with a full explanation/history etc, you could end up with a lot of pages optimized to those tersmand acronyms that would make excellent spider food.

See:-
Compiling a Glossary. [webmasterworld.com]
Building a Glossary page without stuffing keywords [webmasterworld.com]

Onya
Woz

[persepee]

Thanks for the tip, Woz. :^)

That's the best idea I've heard so far and it's most likely what I will end up doing.

[incrediBILL]

not to make you stress out or anything, but google ranks PLURALS different too!

I have "widget, widgets, widget maker, widet makers, etc." all covered.

if you think it's a waste of time, 9 of my top 20 search strings in my log stats are PLURALS.