Mis-spellings

How can you cater for them?

[jackofalltrades]

I came across the site today where the webmaster had deliberately misspelled different words throughout the site to cater for common variations (they were all place names).

At the end of the page was a statement saying they were intentional and this was to cater for people not spelling the name right when using a search engine.

It seems there a couple of issues there:

1. Professionalism...how will your site be perceived if there are spelling errors all the way thru it?

2. SE's .... are they gonna be happy that the site is being developed in this way? It seems to me as long as you are accommodating people who are searching for what you have anyway, its OK.

But, if you are trying to steal traffic by targetting brand name misspellings, then you could be in trouble.

What does everyone think?

JOAT :)

ps how do you spell "misspellings"? (the irony...);)

[pageoneresults]

JOAT, I used to do this a couple of years ago. I stopped after I realized that most SE's have their own built in spell checker and will alert you to a misspelling. My little clip to the visitor read like this...

"Good day! Due to the number of visitors that we receive who misspell the term [insert term here], we've purposely built this page just for you. Hey, don't worry about it, 5 out of 10 people misspell the term [insert term here] with the term [insert term here], it is very easy to do."

On one site, I actually provided a link to dictionary.com with the correct spelling of the term. Again, I stopped doing this a couple of years ago so I'm not sure how valid it is today.

I'd say its doable if you did it professionally and did not embarass the visitor, something like I've done above. If you know for sure that 5 out of 10 searchers are misspelling the term, than there is targeted traffic there to be had.

The other issue you'll run across are the different types of spellings. For example, UK English as opposed to US English - optimization vs. optimisation.

[Vampyre]

On one of my websites, most of my traffic comes from misspellings. I just build a doorway page that focuses on the misspelled keyword, and directs the visitors to the main site. This keeps the misspellings off of the main site, so that it looks professional, but still gets the traffic from the misspellings.

[defanjos]

I usually sprinkle a misspelled word here and there on certain pages, it does wonders for your search engine results.

I also include misspellings on the image alt tags

[2_much]

Sometimes there's quite a lot of traffic to be had by doing this because so many people are spelling impaired or are typing so quickly they misspell certain words.

I've made full sites revolving around misspellings, and the way I do it is I balance the misspelling with the correct spelling, sorta like pageoneresults is doing.

Remember that because it's a misspelling it's bound to not be very competitive so you don't have to overdo it.