User Contributed- Typos
Here is an experimental user contributed post. The reason why I say its experimental is because the post was originally written and sent to me by George Tucker from Intelligent Coffee. It’s a great article that really got me thinking about what is normally a pretty commonly discussed topic in SEO: typos and misspellings. From there I couldn’t help myself and had to add my own little ideabox into it. So here are both!
From George Tucker:
I once enjoyed #1 Google rankings for a misspelling that was only listed once on the page, and that was in the META keywords tag.
This particular website is a review site for anti-aging and anti-wrinkle skincare products (tons of bucks in that particular niche). I found that there were three different types of keywords that were relatively easy to rank:
-
Brand names (lots of skin care brands don’t have a strong online presence)
-
Scientific / chemical compound names (N-6 furfuryladenine, anyone?)
-
Typos
Ranking for typos has become a fairly common concept, but there are three specific methods to generate typos and to make them more effective.
-
Do you habitually misspell a word? (For me, it’s caffiene.) Odds are, others do, too. Use WordTracker to generate a keyword list based on the proper spelling and use find/replace. Congratulations, you’ve just created your own sub-niche!
-
Can’t remember how to spell something? Take your best guess - then jot down your inadvertent misspelling. (Ridiculous numbers of people are trying to buy expresso machines.)
-
The simple transposition of letters due to typos. When you’re typing fast and you flub a word, make a note of it. (This is where my formerly-#1 ranking misspelling was born.)
To cast a wider net for typos, make use of an automatic typo generator like the Typo Trap. This particular tool generates typos based on accidentally hitting an adjacent key on a QWERTY keyboard while typing a search term. Because they’re auto-generated, the words don’t make much sense, but they’re good for machine-generated pages and sites. (I find the WordTracker misspelling generator to be completely worthless.)
Typos are an excellent example of the long tail, and one that’s fairly easy to exploit. Often, they’re low-hanging fruit. Keep track of your own typos and sprinkle them throughout your white hat sites. Generate random typos and plug them into your keyword.txt file for machine-generated sites.
—————————————————
Great article. Thanks George! I’ll keep my portion short.
As mentioned there are quite a few typo generators available to try such as Typo Trap. However if you’re an automation junkie like myself and are actually looking for a nice list you should try this…
-
Open Microsoft Word on your computer
-
Click Tools.
-
Click Autocorrect Options
-
Look towards the bottom of the dialog box
Microsoft was kind enough to provide a nice big list of the most common misspellings and typos in the English language! The downside? No mass select or copy and paste on the list. Yeah bummer right?! Try going to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/207748 and getting the macro utility. Export your autocorrect db using the macro utility and then see what happens when you open it up in a text editor.
Outside Resources
Wikipedia’s List of Common Mispellings - Scrapable version.
Your Dictionary 100 Most Common Mispelled Words
Food For Thought
How about celebrity names and brand names?
Comments (78)
These comments were imported from the original blog. New comments are closed.
This is a really stupid question but what language does the script need to be in?
tryy
Would it be worth it for you guys if i built a typo generator/analyzer tool Blue Hat style? If you guys think you might actually use it often I’d probably be willing to build it.
Basically what it would do is, you enter a word/pronoun and it would do the qwerty thing and find all the combinations of typos. Then it would analyze each type and estimate a percentage of the time that, that particular typo happens. Then it would sort the typos by popularity.
Ie.
The- teh - Happens 13% of the time.
The- hte - Happens 7% of the time.
etc…. Whats the interest level on a tool like this?
I’d use the google api.
search for the correct spelling and then the typo. Grab the total results. (typo/correct)*100+delimiter=percentage of occurance. The delimiter will be a small percentage that weighs the difference between what people put up on a website and what they type naturally while searching. People tend to spell check and proof read before they put up text on a website so the typorate of a word or person name will naturally be lower than the natural. The delimiter will attempt to guess the difference.
That aside the sorting from most typoed to least typoed should be about as accurate as it can get. All in all it should come out fairly accurate and it should work for everything(names, places, phrases) not just english words. The other typo tools just give typo possibilties. Am I missing something or would that make this the most accurate typo tool out there? The only question that remains is, is there even a demand for a tool like this?
Example:
Google will correct you if you misspell a word. In my opinion generated typos are a waste of time because of google suggestion. I agree dropping a typo each and there but I wouldn’t waste much time with them.
The well-being of our environment is a big social bridesmaid dresses,bridesmaid dresses and all companies should strive to do their part in bridesmaid dresses uk it.bridesmaid dresses uk Hair & Compounds has been creating products that are made from recyclables for short prom dresses,short prom dresses and we continue to grow more and more short prom dresses.
Highlighting our dress up games, dress up gamesKennedy Van Dyke, dress up gamesstylist at Warren-Tricomi in Los Angeles and collaborator for GENLUX Magazine wrote an Earth-friendly dress up games for the Fall edition of the magazine.56
keep it up
thanx