There seems to be a debate in the SEO world lately – and that is whether or not to optimize for misspelled words. Theory is simple: in order to capture searchers who enter wrongly spelled words into Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine for that matter, website managers need to deliberately place the incorrect spelling into their content. Simply brilliant, at least in theory. But does it really work?

A lot of people in the search engine optimization community make the most out of misspelled words, but a growing number seem to be against it, too. Their reason for disagreeing? They say it sacrifices. A site loses integrity when it is peppered by misspellings; after all, a badly written page fails to generate customer confidence. In the long run, readers lose trust in the website, and this can be catastrophic for a business trying to sell a product or service online. Still, the pro-misspelling argument is compelling. It may seem like a despicable tactic to grammar Nazis, but its effectiveness cannot be undermined. Let’s do the math. A simple search using the Wordtracker Competition Search Automation will show that some 167 people search for the phrase “SEO Visibility” per day, across major search engines. This correctly spelled version has 600+ competing pages.

Meanwhile, the misspelled version that is “SEO Visibilitly” is searched 142 times per day – less than the correct version, true, but only by 25. What’s really more interesting is the fact the competition for this misspelled word is significantly lower – there are only 7 competing pages.

So, what do you think? Is it worth it to sacrifice spelling correctness for traffic?

Ingrid Cudia
SEO columnist
Blackwood Productions

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