As most of you probably know, keywords are an integral part of researching the search engine potential behind any niche site or individual blog post. Quite often you’ll come across searches that are obvious spelling errors, while others are not so obvious at first glance. Just recently I was casually browsing keywords when I came across something along the lines of “cat insurance” – it had little competition and a massive number of searches so I wondered why nobody had happened onto it yet.

But when I looked down at the keyboard I saw that “T” was next to the letter “R” and it instantly made sense – Google was obviously auto-correcting “cat insurance” and including it as part of their results for “car insurance” (given the click costs and related terms once researched further). No doubt some people do actually search for “cat insurance” purposely, but given the more obvious alternative it’s likely a small percentage and I decided it was best to stay away from. Here are some more reasons to be careful:

1. Minimal Targeted Traffic

If I was to go ahead and build a site around “cat insurance” as described above it would probably receive a lot of traffic – the problem is that most of it wouldn’t find the site relevant. Most of them would decide that the information wasn’t what they were looking for, they’d made a mistake and then leave. Targeted traffic is essential to make decent amounts of money, particularly when dealing with affiliate programs. Not much of that means not much money.

2. You Can Look Stupid

With the above example it would have been obvious that the person searching had made a mistake, and it was not a mistake on the page itself. In some cases it can be – take for example a site about “dog breeds” in which that phrase is repeatedly spelt “dog breads”. Again, hundreds of thousands of people probably search “dog breads” by mistake but if you intentionally build a site for them it can make you look just as silly. Probably even more so.

3. Your Information Loses Credibility

If you intentionally – or even unintentionally – litter your information with such obvious spelling errors then not only can it make you look silly but it forces the reader to question their faith in the information at hand. If you haven’t noticed a few simple errors then just how accurate and credible is the source of information?

4. No Search Ranking Favors

If you optimize your site on-page and off-page for terms that are glaring spelling errors then it obviously looks like you’re trying to game the search engines, meaning they are not likely to rank you higher than a more credible source. That and the job of search engines is primarily to provide relevant quality information to people browsing – they usually know what a person means when they misspell something and will likely show results for the correctly-spelt phrase instead.


Millionaire Studio is an online entrepreneurship blog that features articles on online business as well as advice on the best email direct marketing tool.

http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brent_McCoy

Filed under: Search Engine Optimization

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