The hardest thing about onsite SEO? People can't spell.

[Harold Mansfield]

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]

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]

It's never been an issue when looking at my stats, so it is not something I thought of doing.

[Business Attorney]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.