<strong>To Google, Or Not To Google?</strong> 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 Google 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 our<a
href="http://www.lilengine.com" title="Search Engine
Optimization">Search Engine Optimization</a> site
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 Google 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.
<strong>Finding Common Misspellings</strong> 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.
<strong>Here’s how you do it.</strong> 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
Google Search for the misspelling and see how many results Google
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.
<strong>Summary</strong> 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.
About the author:
Alec Duncan is the founder of LilEngine.com a <a
href="http://www.lilengine.com" title="Search Engine
Optimization">Search Engine Optimization</a> resource site.
Visit Li'l Engine for search engine optimization tools and
strategies and also check out <a
href="http://www.developertutorials.com" title="Developer
Tutorials">Developer Tutorials</a> for web development
techniques and strategies.
