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keyword spelled 2 different ways

keyword spelled 2 different ways

         

shmekkyl

7:06 pm on May 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



On the site I am building, the major keyword has 2 different spellings (ends in ent and ant). What is the best way to build this for optimal seo under both spellings? Should I mirror the site and use -ent on one and -ant on another?

-J

FleaPit

7:25 pm on May 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I guess it is really at test of your copy writing skills and page layout. I have had similar experiences between the US and UK markets where many US words differ from the original english term e.g. colour / color. Invariably I end up optimising two pages (not duplicate content) although this can depend on the content and structure of your pages.

ciml

9:20 pm on May 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I wouldn't mirror the site and change just a word; this clutters up search results and detracts from the user experience of the Web.

If you have both domains, I suggest using an HTTP status 301 redirect from one to the other.

For Google listings, I suggest following FleaPit's suggetion and picking different pages of content for different phrases.

Tropical Island

10:12 pm on May 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



We have many different spellings for both the area in which we operate and for the country name. We have created pages with these spellings to facillitate searchers finding us and Google indexing us. Google will index both spellings although if they think one is incorrect they will indicate it by putting "did you mean.....?"

Robert Charlton

1:23 am on May 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



>>the major keyword has 2 different spellings (ends in ent and ant)<<

This is always difficult. You don't want to duplicate content... ie, you don't want two pages whose only difference is the spelling of your target word. This is bad for the engines and bad for users. You also don't want to appear illiterate.

I'm in a situation right now where research shows that a targeted brand name is misspelled on the web twice as often as it's spelled correctly. Let's say that Brandent is the correct spelling, but Brandant is searched more often. On pages where the brand name is a part of the target, after much discussion, we've decided to go with page titles in this form...

Brandent/Brandant Widgets

This acknowledges the problem right off... puts the correct spelling first... and gives us an exact match on "Brandant Widgets," which is the more competitive form. On the page, we're favoring the correct spelling, but we're covering our bases for both.

I don't use "Brandent/Brandant" on the page, but I have exact matches for both "Brandent Widgets" and "Brandant Widgets." Probably, because of this dual targeting, I'll have more uses of "widgets" on the page than I'd like. This dual targeting on one page more difficult to do if your phrases are very competitive... you may then have to build separate pages, with unique content.

Somewhere I remember somebody suggesting introducing the misspelling by saying, "No matter how you spell it..." Depends on the style of the site.

I don't know what you'd find if you tried searching for the topic here via Google, but you might turn up some good threads... there have been a lot of them. Try a search for:

mispellings site:webmasterworld.com

Liane

2:13 am on May 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



As CIML advised, I would not think about having a mirror site. You only need to read the Google News threads for a day to find out why.

I have at least 6 of my keywords with different spellings. They are all very important keywords and critical to the success of the site. On the index page, I have used both spellings for two of the most important keywords and weighted them similarly.

The really big problem comes into play when there are not only two different spellings ... but people frequently spell both incorrectly! :)

There is enough information on the site that I have been able to target each of the different spellings for different pages of content.

Don't worry, people aren't stupid. They will recognize that if you have spelled a word one way on one page and another way on a different page ... that it was likely done in order to pull traffic from both sectors of the population using both correct spellings. (They won't think you are a moron who can't spell!)

Just write some really good content and target one or two keywords per page. The rest should take care of itself.