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.
1. 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!
2. 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.)
3. 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.
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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…
1. Open Microsoft Word on your computer
2. Click Tools.
3. Click Autocorrect Options
4. 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?
Nice post–both of you. Btw, I like the new favicon.
A few days ago when Alta-vista was king, I had most of the misspelled debt keywords dominated.
I am the worst speller, ever. Yes, I even used Google spell check to type this.
There are still many niches open to misspellings.
Great post with some good ideas. I really liked the MS Word tip.
Do you recommend focusing on one misspelling per article, or using several? Also, is it beneficial to also spell the word correctly a few times throughout the article?
Thought it was about time I commented on your blogs since it’s one of the best out there when it comes to IM and SEO - keep on doing whatcha doing!
About the celebrity/brand names: In porn, where I earn my living, you could replace those words with pornstars/paysite names and there’s a HUGE amount of traffic to be had from these things.
With the biggest pornstars getting 50k+ searches a month, typos can easily get over 1000 searches and they’re wicked easy to rank for.
Celebrity names would be the exact same thing though I guess those aren’t as easy to monetize (unless it’s P. Hilton of course ^_^).
Not to scare anyone off of using names, but just a word of warning–know what you’ve created before putting it out there (often tough when you’ve got nine bazillion pages on autopilot).
With names (celebrity and other people, as well as company/website names) you do have to be somewhat careful as to what you’re putting out there. There have been plenty of stories of Markov generated text spitting out some imflamatory remark which brings lawyers a runnin’.
I remember a story on syndk8 about a guy who had a generated site that pulled in some text regarding a law firm…don’t remember the details but anytime lawyers are involved it can’t be pretty…
Great suggestions, Eli!
One last thought: if you’re using WebSpinner or similar synonymizing software, you should definitely plug in some misspellings as synonyms.
typo trap only finds computre genereated mispellings.
Using typos what is suggested: a. a new page for each typo (including content), or b. typos included in the original (non-typoed) keyword’s page? I’ve used both methods, and while more traffic seems to come from method a, but those pages seem to get put into supplemental index or removed altogether fairly quickly.
Also, I use a custom-made tool to generate my typos. Currently it does the following: wrong key–replaces a letter based on nearby keyboard keys, missed character–removes a character completely, transposed character–switches two characters around, double character–repeats a character. It spits out a huge list (73 with “rose water” as input) but shortcomings are as Rose Water pointed out. Hate to think of the length of the resulting keyword list if I went even deeper with multiple mispellings per keyword or adding letters in differing positions. It will do 2/3 of the mispellings in his sentence, though…
good advice kansieo
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?
How would you estimate a percentage of occurence?
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:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=Caffiene&btnG=Search
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.
definitely not a waste of time…especially when targeting a high traffic/high search area. I made a lot of money off of the nintendo wii launch from typos (and only typos–do you think me, a little guy, has any chance to rank for the term ‘nintendo wii’ anywhere in the top 10–let alone the top 100–against nintendo, gamestop, gamespot or any other large retailer or review site with kajillions of natural links? not likely…). My point is, most people are bad spellers and will search on phonics (hmmm, new product?) rather than proper spelling. terms like nntendo wii, nintendo wei, etc. generated thousands of hits for me and probably will continue to do so over the next month.
We’re not even talking low hanging fruit, we’re talking about the stuff that’s already fallen to the ground. While maybe not as pristine as the stuff at the top of the tree, there is plenty of it around…
I don’t do a lot of typo marketing or anything. I really don’t put any thought into it. However on my screensaver project(part of the 100/day post) I accidently typoed two celeb names in my rush to make all the pages. One was Jessica Alba. I didn’t realize it till i started getting a ton of search traffic coming from the typo. Which of course made me decide to keep the typos on the page.
Interesting.
I had some traffic from the typos.. but small.. at most 50 visitors.
I tried the common technique, and made a list with all the typos possible for that word.. no big traffic.
Maybe is important the domain of the type too.
Taking kansieo example, for this search Google has no suggestion.
I promise to donate 10$ to this tool.
concerning the demand, all the other typo tools suck!@!
hey, tudor, why not target nintendo pee? 500k vs 18000k for wii. heh.
To eli: I think a bluehat-style misspelling tool would be nice. In my experience, when I mispell words its only from typing too fast and hitting a nearby key, though if someone wasn’t nearly as good a speller as me, its hard to imagine how they misspell stuff. Although hooking into the google api would probably be awesome.
I also like good keywords, it’s a nice little all-in-one keyword lookup utility.
http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/updates.php?gkw2
I’ve been working with artist/celeb misspellings for some time now. Great to generate some money each day from them (1-5 dollars per site). I’m in the process of doing 50 more right now before the new year. Great post.
http://adlab.msn.com/keyMut/default.aspx
Another helpful tool (free!) for discovering misspellings.
You might not get much traffic even if you rank first on Google for a particular typo.Google’s suggests the right spelling and it is quite efficient.
And according to me people correct their searches and search for the right (spelled) Keyword, atleast i do that (coz it hardly takes a few seconds).
I have been using some common misspellings to come up top. I just put it in my meta description tag. Its very easy to get top position for these.