<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.