According to Google AdWords Keywords Tool, internet surfers make lots of typos when they are using Google search engine. Lot of people have typed ‘jewlery’ instead of jewelry. So, if you have an online jewelry shop – or any type of online business – this type of mistakes can bring traffic to your site if you know how to take advantage of it.

How Can Misspellings Work in Your Favor

1. If people find it difficult to type your name or what you sell, buy a common misspelled domain, create a different version of your site and send all the links to your original web site.

2. If your site has a blog, add a few comments with the common misspelled variations of your keywords.

3. Create anchor texts with the misspelled keywords. You can ‘sacrifice’ a few articles and add them to a different penname with the misspelled words.

4. Use a misspelling PPC campaign to drive traffic to your site.

Here are the three different types of misspellings.

Common misspellings. These are words in the English language that are difficult to spell and are frequently butchered. Examples include “jewelry”, “archaeologist”, and “etiquette”.
Proper nouns. These include names of people, places, and things with ambiguous spelling. For example, Google previously ran a 3 month experiment to analyze misspellings of “britney spears” in its search engine. The result? There were 593 different variations with 20% of all queries misspelled. The misspellings “brittany” and “brittney” accounted for 16% of searches.
Typos. These are simply typographical errors that lead to misspellings. For example, check out thisd awesomew sentnce. Obviously, I know how to spell those words, I was just in a rush and my fat fingers refused to cooperate.

Ways to Optimize For Misspellings

1. Use SEO best practices as usual – not recommend
The first and most obvious option is to optimize a page for your targeted misspelling as you normally would for any keyword. This means including it in your URL, title tag, header tag, content, and navigation. However, having misspellings on your site front and center is very unprofessional and could cost you a lot of links and credibility. This hurts you in the long term and isn’t really worth the immediate gains you get from ranking for misspelings. I don’t recommend you do this.

2. Turn the misspelling into a brand name – get the exact match domain
An alternative is to get creative and use a common misspelling of a popular keyword as the brand name for your site. Isn’t that what Flickr.com does? By utilizing this method you get the best of both worlds – optimization for your targeted keyword and a popular misspelling. Plus you don’t sacrifice any credibility in the process (as long as the misspelling isn’t blatant). If you do decide to go this route, be sure to pick up the exact match domain for the misspelling (more on this in the next point).

3. Build microsites using exact match domains for your targeted misspellings
Google and the other search engines tend to give websites with the exact match domain for a keyword a significant boost in the rankings. For example, regardless of links and site authority, Cars.com gets an advantage in Google rankings just because it’s domain name exactly matches the search query. Use this to your advantage for misspellings of your keywords. Buy up the most popular misspellings of your targeted keywords (if available) and build out microsites for each. It’ll be much easier for you to obtain #1 rankings for the misspellings this way and then you can add links back to your main site.

4. Add in a “commonly misspelled as” section
Another way to add misspellings into the body copy of your pages is to add a phrase or section that states “…commonly misspelled as…”. Of course the effects of this method won’t be huge because the misspellings won’t actually be in important elements like the title tag, but it can still be effective when coupled with links to the page using the misspelling as the anchor text (more on this in point 6).

5. Add the misspellings in user-generated content on your site
This one’s my favorite way to get misspellings on a site. If you have a blog or a forum as part of your website, simply add in a few fake comments or forum replies that make use of the misspellings. This won’t take away from the credibility of the site because it’s someone else making the errors, not you. This happens naturally with user-generated content anyway. Extra bonus if you can create a forum thread with a misspelling that shows up in the title of the page.

6. Build links using the misspelling in the anchor text
If you remember, a bunch of bloggers engaged in something called “Google bombing” a while back to get President George Bush’s website to rank #1 in Google for “miserable failure”. All they did was simply link to that page using the “miserable failure” keyword as the link text. Well the same principle can be applied here with misspellings. First, try to get the actual misspelling on the page you’re trying to rank for by using tip #4 or 5. Since Google has put filters in place to prevent Google bombing, having the actual misspelled keywords on your page will help. Once you’ve done that, build links to that page using the misspelling in the anchor text. Blog comment links (without nofollow) and links in blog and forum posts are the easiest and should help you move up in the rankings.

Additionally, you can even create links on your own site using the the misspellings as the anchor text. Of course you wouldn’t want this version to show publicly, so what you can do is place the link in a noscript tag so that only search engines see it.

7. Forget about the meta keywords tag
There was a time when search engines actually used the meta keywords tag to determine the relevancy of a page. No more. This was once a good place to insert keyword misspellings, but it’s pretty much useless now.

8. Bid on misspellings in paid search
Similar to SEO, there is opportunity to drive traffic and make money with keyword misspellings in paid search. Since competition is generally very low for these terms, clicks will be very very cheap. Add some of your misspellings in a PPC campaign and test it out. You might be surprised at some of the keywords that drive traffic and convert well.

9. Buy up typo domain names for type-in traffic
Finally, look into buying up misspelled domain names for their type-in traffic potential. For example, a domainer named Kevin Ham shrewdly bought up the .cm domains (Cameroon country code, misspelling for .com) for popular websites like the New York Times. Needless to say, he’s doing very well for himself. The potential payout for domain name “typosquatting” is huge. Google supplies about 60% of the ads on these types of sites and makes $497 million per year. Wow.

Have you discovered any opportunities with keyword misspellings in SEO or PPC? If so, how much traffic and revenue are they driving? Share some of your experiences and tips in the comments below.

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