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View Full Version : The hardest thing about onsite SEO? People can't spell.



Harold Mansfield
12-11-2012, 04:03 PM
I'm always amazed when I look at my stats to see how people find my sites. The spelling that people rely on to find accurate results in the search engines is atrocious.
I always tell my clients to be wary of words that are commonly misspelled, or optimize for the misspelling as well, but these days that could be any word.

Do any of you intentionally use misspellings as keywords or in any SEO at all?
Is Google's correction/suggestion actually helping or hurting by not making people spell correctly?

krymson
12-11-2012, 10:59 PM
I do, Google recommends it, simply because people are stupid. it could be that they're looking for "water heaters" and the type "water eaters" or if its a difficult word like "communications", some people sound it out and spell it "communicaitions". It's good practice but not necessary.

Wozcreative
12-12-2012, 06:58 PM
It's never been an issue when looking at my stats, so it is not something I thought of doing.

Business Attorney
12-12-2012, 07:24 PM
I've noticed that, too, but the two big search engines (Google and Bing) either automatically correct spelling in the search itself or at least serve up the correct word. Obviously that only works where the search engine can figure out the word you really mean, but they are pretty good at that. Try searching for "glof cart" or "chicago fottball" - the search engines don't even look for "glof" or "fottball". Someone trying to rank for those words would be wasting their time.

dianecoleen
12-26-2012, 05:34 PM
We're having with the same issue too. Does it matter if the keyword that have been used is in wrong spelling? I think that is an advantage that you are ranking in two different keywords. But I'm not really sure if it's a good factor in your site rankings.

vangogh
12-29-2012, 08:01 PM
I wouldn't purposely misspell things on your site just to pick up some extra search traffic. First, search engines are actually smart enough at this point to figure out a lot of the common misspellings. More importantly people are going to eventually read those words on your page. Would you rather a few less people find you, but those that do come away from your site feeling confident in you and your business or would you rather a few more people find you and walk away thinking you're less than competent?

Pack-Secure
12-30-2012, 04:52 PM
On a side note, we just added a smart search to our site. This search, converts the misspelled words. I have seen an improvement. It is not perfect, but better than an exact spell search feature.

SDGSteve
01-02-2013, 02:01 PM
There's only so many keywords you can rank well for, unless you suspect a staggering amount of lost business I doubt it's worth wasting one of those keywords on any one of a multitude of potential bad spellings or typos.

Marcomguy
01-11-2013, 12:06 PM
The search engines are smart enough to figure out misspellings. That's why the misspellers' misspellings didn't prevent them from finding your site in the first place!

SEOAlpha
01-13-2013, 01:11 PM
They're not smart enough to figure that when a keyword has an "S" on the end of it, 99% of the time they should display the same results for that queries. You'd have thought that they would have worked our plurals by now.

Marcomguy
01-14-2013, 07:38 PM
I've noticed that sometimes Google returns the same results for plurals and sometimes it doesn't. For example, "Canon cameras" and "Canon camera" gives the same results in the top 3 positions (I didn't check the rest of the page). On the other hand, for one of my clients' products, the singular and plural keywords return quite different results.

vangogh
01-17-2013, 02:32 AM
Yeah I don't think it's always one or the other. I think Google has gotten pretty good and recognizing singular and plural, but there are times when it might make sense to show different results. One might be more indicative of a search for products and another for information maybe.

For site owners it should't be that hard to mix in both singular and plural into your copy. You should be mixing in synonyms too. It's why I don't think people should think about things like keyword density. Just write naturally and stay on topic. Use variations of words and phrases that make for good writing. If you stay on topic you're using the right words.

justinm
02-15-2013, 04:05 PM
When you look at your stats of people coming to your site, you have to figure a lot will be foreign, and not that there is anything wrong with that, but if English is not their first language, well they might not have the best spelling. Also, not all the data is 100% correct.

jim.sklansky
02-17-2013, 01:02 AM
Do any of you intentionally use misspellings as keywords or in any SEO at all?
Is Google's correction/suggestion actually helping or hurting by not making people spell correctly?

Sorry to say, i unintentionally write the misspell word when i search in Google. But not every time. I try not to put wrong word but sometimes it happen. Today, the spelling correction option is in every writing section, so we don't need to bother about putting the wrong word. We can check the spelling before submitting.

vangogh
02-20-2013, 03:12 AM
we don't need to bother about putting the wrong word. We can check the spelling before submitting.

That works with some words, but not others. For example there, they're, and their are all spelled correctly, but they all mean different things. Granted those aren't words a search engine is going to consider when deciding what pages to return, but there are plenty of words spelled right that might not mean what you expect them to mean. For the most part I think search engines have gotten pretty good at understanding misspellings. There are lots of times I mistype a word, but it's clear from the results that the search engines knew what I meant to type.

Multimedia Marketing
03-01-2013, 04:37 PM
I wouldn't purposely misspell things on your site just to pick up some extra search traffic. First, search engines are actually smart enough at this point to figure out a lot of the common misspellings. More importantly people are going to eventually read those words on your page. Would you rather a few less people find you, but those that do come away from your site feeling confident in you and your business or would you rather a few more people find you and walk away thinking you're less than competent?

This is really the point.... back in 2002 you could pick up a lot of extra traffic by going after keyword mispellings... it used be a great way to get cheap PPC keywords as well. As soon as Google started auto correcting that game was over. If you purposely optimize your title tags for the misspelled words you will lose credibility in the eyes of your visitors.

vangogh
03-05-2013, 11:17 AM
If you purposely optimize your title tags for the misspelled words you will lose credibility in the eyes of your visitors.

Exactly. Having that credibility is so much more important than some extra search traffic. Once upon a time you could bury a few misspellings in your text, but there's no reason to do that any more. Search engines are generally smart enough to auto correct and the misspelling probably does more damage than what you gain from a few extra visitors.