SEO For Mis-Spelled keywords
Submitted by slainte on Wed, 07/25/2007 - 01:54.
Hi
While doing some Niche research I found a 3-keyword Keyphrase which has one of the 3 words mis-spelled. The Keyphrase with the mis-spelled keyword has over 2 million pages returned on Google UK but the Keyphrase with the mis-spelled keyword in quotes has 0 pages competition.
Obviously when you enter the Keyphrase with the mis-spelled keyword into Google it makes the suggestion for the correct spelling and shows all the sites for the correctly spelled keyword. All of the SERPS results in Google show the Home page for all these sites as they are highly optimised for the correctly spelled keyword and the number of incoming links to each of the Top5 sites is at least 2,000 (Checked on Yahoo).
So, my question is:
Even if I were to optimise my niche site for a mis-spelled keyword would Google just ignore it anyway in the SERP's even if I could optimise my site over time with on-page factors and more incoming links than each of the current Top 5?
(If I thought it worthwhile in optimising a site for a mis-spelled keyword over the long-term then I would spend a bit of time doing so.)
Or, as a matter of habit do most people just tend to click on the suggested 'correctly spelled' version that Google suggests anyway? I for one don't always click on it and it would be useful to know what some of you guys/gals do.
Thanks
Slainte
Personally I always click on the Google suggested term if it's correct. When I misspell something and Google fixes it and suggests a search for the correct spelling, there may as well be a cloud over all the rest of the results because I go straight for that link. I've never seen anyone I know do anything different when they are searching and misspell something, but I don't have any hard data.
I typically click on the correct spelling once I realized I misspelled the word, however, I'm not sure everybody does this. The value in targeting misspelled words is that they are not as competitive.
I have had a lot of success with misspelled words in paid search, but haven't really tried this approach with natural search. Most of the sites I see ranking for misspelled words don't necessarily appear to be optimizing their pages for the misspelling, it looks inadvertent.
The only thing to be concerned about his visitor perception, if they realize the words are misspelled in your copy you could lose credibility...
Best,
Jeremy
I have a little experance with this, mostly because im a horrible speller. I have a site in which i misspelled an anchor text to a friends website. I misspelled "Meatloaf Recipe" as "Meatloaf Reciepe". This is a common misspelling of it but the thing is i ended up ranked number 1 on the Google serp for this misspelling and was getting more traffic to my site than my friend was. His site was about meatloaf and mine was not. I only had the one misspelling on the site. So i think it can be usefull if you don't over do it. I wouldnt do a whole site for a misspelling but i would not be beyond adding one in the site.