AdSense Traffic Tip: Take advantge, er, advantage, of misspelled keywords

You know that section in my book where I talked about writing content that uses correct spelling and good grammar? You still want to do that. Having well-written content, preferably unique content that you wrote yourself or hired someone to write for you, is absolutely key to sticking out from the rest of the crowd.

But the reality is that not everyone is a good speller. I see it all the time on Web pages. My wife sees it all the time in the (university-level!) papers she marks. There's really no excuse for creating misspelled web pages, not with all the free spelling and grammar tools available today.

Unless, of course, you're doing it deliberately to target search engine traffic.

The truth is that many searches are done using misspelled keywords. The reasons are varied. Often it's because the user typed too quickly and dropped a letter or two. So instead of searching for “invisible fence” (1.9 million pages in Google) they search for “invisble fence” (1240 pages in Google). Sure, the search engine may offer to correct the query — Did you mean “invisible fence”? — but often as not the user just clicks on the links or the ads that show up, because those pages are still relevant to what they're searching for.

So one simple way to get extra search engine traffic is to misspell your keywords. I kid you not! If the advertisers can target those misspelled keywords (and they often do — Google even suggests misspelled versions of keywords in their keyword tool) then why can't you? It's just another trick in the search engine optimization arsenal.

There are a couple of different approaches you can take to do this. One is to create almost identical pages of content with the misspelled versions of the keywords. If you have the keyword in the page URL itself this is very easy to do, literally a cut and paste job once you copy the file over to its misspelled variant. The other approach is put in a landing page devoted to the misspelled keyword that links (but not redirects) to the real page. This is a purer approach, but it will probably lead to less traffic because visitors will be more likely to hit the browser's back button right away to get back to the search results page, since there's no obviously compelling content on the landing page. You have to find the right balance that works for you. Personally, I prefer the landing page approach because it makes it clear the misspellings are deliberate and not that I'm merely incompetent. (Spelling is important for a writer!)

Of course, don't forget to show ads on these pages, because the advertisers may in fact pay more for misspelled keywords than the correct versions.

The real trick to this, though, is to make sure the pages with the misspelled keywords get into the search engine indexes. Ideally, you want to do it without interfering with the regular (correctly-spelled) site content. It's easy to do this using Google's Sitemaps feature: just include the misspelled pages in the map. But you'll need regular links to those pages for the other search engines to find them, so you'll either need a page or even a separate site that links to those specific pages. You could use the traditional sitemap page for this, but it's not good to clutter it up — it's meant to be human-readable — so you'd probably want one or more pages that are linked to from the sitemap instead.

Watch for another posting about this when we come to Stage 5 of the AdSense case study and alter the Invisible Fence Guide to catch misspelled words using both techniques.

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