Remember when your third grade English teachers kept getting mad at you for having so many spelling mistakes in your essays? Well, now it’s your turn to tell them off by explaining to them that you don’t have to be a spelling bee genius to profit off your affiliate site.
What am I talking about exactly? I’m talking about how opportunistic webmasters are able to capitalize on misspelled words entered by users in the search engines and turn it into SEO gold. Some of you might be wondering why you should bother considering placing this into the back pocket of your SEO strategy list. Well, phonetics plays a big role on how people write things down on paper and, in the English language, not everything is spelled in the exact way that you hear it.
Let’s say you’re running an affiliate site that sells sports equipment and you notice that people search for the keyword “dumbbells” at least a million times a month. However, some people – perhaps around a hundredth of the original number – might mistakenly type in the word “dumbells” instead and find no relevant matches. That’s around 10,000 potential customers a month lost because they couldn’t find what they were looking for.
This is why it’s important to consider misspelled keywords in your SEO tactics. Here are a couple of guidelines that you might want to take a look at on how to properly integrate misspelled keywords into your campaign:
- Don’t intentionally place misspellings on your high traffic pages – This includes your home page and your sales pages. Aside from making these pages look unprofessional to your site’s visitors, Google won’t exactly rule in your favor when it sees that you have the lexicon of a five year old. Try to keep these pages as neat and as smart as possible. Take note that high profile page elements like your headings and title tags are also included in this guideline.
- Place misspelled words in pages with a large amount of text – This is especially true when you copy and paste transcripts taken from a forum or an article written by another author. Google won’t penalize you as much when it sees your typos mixed in with a lot of other text. User generated pages like forums or comments sections are perfect for this.
- Insert misspelled keywords in less prominent places - You can easily place typos away from the prying eyes of human beings in places like alt tags for images or even meta tags. Of course, try not to abuse this since spamming these misspelled words can be just as bad as keyword spamming with the proper spelling.
- Take a page off Google’s typo suggestions – I’m sure you’ve noticed that Google suggests corrections whenever it feels as if you made a typographical mistake. Well, you can also incorporate the same trick in your site’s search bar and account for any misspelled words users might accidentally enter when looking for something on your site. This should cover you for your misspelled keywords without making it too obvious to both your users and the search engines.
- Use a typo generator to check for alternate spellings - Once you have a definite set of keywords that you’re competing for within your niche, try to run them through a typo generator to get the alternate misspellings of the word. Sites like Rank Tracker have a built in typo generator that lists down potential misspellings for your keywords. Typo generators usually give four different variants of misspellings: keyword proximity typos, swapped characters typos, duplicate character typos and missing character typos. You can then choose which ones you want to incorporate into your site.
Later,
Andy “Spelling Meastro Maistro Maestro” Jenkins
