Are You Being Misspelled?

Are your products or is your business name being misspelled? Yahoo once released an article listing the 20 most often misspelled search terms or words. Most were celebrity names, a few were well-known business or domain names. Britney Spears was listed twice in the top twenty; I found it interesting that her fans could find two different ways to misspell her name.

When people search for your website or the products and services that it promotes are they spelling things correctly? Domain names as well as products or services that are difficult to spell often lead to searchers guessing at or taking their best shot when spelling the word. Of course, we have no control over whether or not visitors spell correctly but we can compensate for commonly misspelled words or phrases.

Common misspellings can be included in the Meta tags in your site. This way search engines may still pick up on the misspelling and direct searchers properly to your website. For example, if the name of your business were “Alladin’s Castle”, you could add variations of the correct spelling to your meta tags to enhance the chances that any misspelled attempt to find your site would be directed to you. Variations such as, “Aladins Castle”, “Alladin’s Casel”, and more could be used to search for the same website.

Some webmasters will even include commonly misspelled words in the content of a web page. This makes it even more likely that search engines will index the page properly for searchers without a dictionary. This practice can turn away some visitors who may catch the misspellings and feel that the content has not been proofed or that the provider did not know how to spell the word correctly. A search engine may penalize your website for this practice as well.

Major search engines have advanced and can detect many misspelled search terms and automatically correct for them. They can detect variants of misspelled search terms and still point the searcher in the right direction. There are times when search engines don’t know the correct spelling of a term because it is not a common word or phrase, while rare, these instances can be addressed by adding the misspellings to your meta tags (contact us if you need help with this).

Examine your domain and business names along with your products and or services; if they are commonly misspelled a few adjustments may solve the problem.