How do you account for misspellings in search engine queries?

[MartinKlausmeier]

Howdy everyone,

I'm pretty new to the whole SEO thing, in fact I hadn't even heard the term until this past Fall when a company I was doing a little freelance writing for fired their SEO guy and asked if I thought I could help them with it.

I have a (old) background in HTML coding and web design, but have been out of the business for over a decade.

This may be a simple question, but it has come up in discussion several times...

How do you make sure that users are directed to your site even if they enter keywords with spelling errors?  I know that Google offers "did you mean..." links for a lot of words.  Is that the best method and if so, how do you manipulate the data so the misspellings continue to result in your site being listed?

Any help on this is greatly appreciated!

Marty K.

[KeriMorgret]

I think most of the time people don't worry about it these days, since the search engines are so much better with guessing the correct spelling and showing those results instead of the results for the misspelled word. User forums and reviews are one way you can get misspelled words in without it looking too odd, if that at all fits your situation.

Is your company still asking about this at all, or have you gone way beyond that now?

[CPU]

The way to rank for spelling errors is to optimise for them. Rather than littering the site with poor spelling which will not look good to the user you should try to include the misspelling as genuine content.

For example a light hearted blog post with incorrect spelling vs correct spelling in the title and page name. In the content t could mention the spelling mistakes and unusual terms that people use to find your site (gathered from the analytics data).

It may not be the most interesting post for the visitor and will struggle to gain page specific links but you will have a page optimised in terms of content for the misspelling. If you don't really want people to read it release it to the site at a quiet time and then follow up with a stong post which people will read and the spelling blog post will be overshadowed.

Hope this helps.

[gmk1567]

In general Google results based on LSI - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing

Unless someone optimized for the misspelled word, we will get the same result.