By Alec Duncan
A while back I was posting an article submitted by one of our regular
authors on LilEngine.com and I did it a bit faster than I normally
would. I was in a hurry to catch an appointment and was already running
late. While posting the article I tripped on something that would change
my view on mistakes forever.
In my haste I made a mistake in the article’s title, yes a misspelling,
just as I have purposely misspelt Google Search Engine as Gogle Search
Engine in the title of this article to clue you in on its content.
Weirdly enough the mistake in the title I posted slipped by unnoticed
and eventually got pushed off the homepage and into our archives.
If you follow the course of your content pages after posting them they
usually go into hiding for a few days and then resurface with varying
placement depending on their content and other variables. Every now and
again you will have some page on your site that attracts large amounts
of traffic compared to some of your other pages. This page inevitably
grabs your attention and this is what happened to me.
I noticed a large increase in the daily traffic to www.lilengine.com and
started analyzing the logs to find the culprit. Now, I describe it as a
large increase in traffic as opposed to a large spike in traffic as this
traffic gain did not suddenly appear then disappear. It was a stable
increase in traffic and was funneled to our site by the Gogle Search
Engine :-). It so followed that the page that was responsible for this
flood was the same page with the mistake and it was showing up as #1 in
Google for this keyword misspelling.
Finding Common Misspellings
It is pretty easy to come up with misspellings for your targeted
keywords, however, incorporating them into your content may not be as
easy. With a little imagination you can come up with several methods to
keep your content legitimate for your users and the search engines.
Using the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool and Google Search Results you
can decide which misspellings get the most searches and which are highly
competitive hence which ones would be worth your while to optimize for.
Here’s how you do it. Use the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool to see
how many searches there are for the misspelling. If this number is
satisfactory for you then do a Gogle Search for the misspelling and see
how many results Gogle has for this keyword. If this number is too high
then there may be too much competition for this keyword and you might
want to try another.
Summary
People will always make mistakes and these will include misspellings. If
you can reach out further to your target market by incorporating words
that they may misspell to find your site, in a tasteful manner, then
gearing pages of your website for misspellings should be considered when
optimizing your website.
Author Bio: Alec Duncan is the founder of Li'l Engine a Search Engine
Optimization resource. Visit Li'l Engine for great seo strategies and
also check out Developer Tutorials for web development tutorials.
"Reprinted from Zongoo.com Daily Press & Consumer Information"
