~~~Writing for the Search Engines and Your Prospects~~~
From: Jo Barker
In the last issue of RankWrite, you wrote:
"Make sure that you're on the lookout for typos and other writing boo
boos. Your site may contain incredibly persuasive text - but if it
includes a number of mistakes, watch out. Typos and grammatical
errors scream, "we're not detail oriented nor professional," to a
target audience, and could sabotage your sale. Sure, mistakes happen.
But when the wrong form of "their" is used multiple times, it's time
for damage control."
However, it's clear from Wordtracker that very many searches are
misspelled and ungrammatical. It's also clear from simple searches
that search engines (well, Google) DO pay attention to whether
there's an apostrophe or a plural or a hyphen or whatever. For a
competitive search term such as 'childrens clothes' for example, how
do you suggest optimising WITHOUT Using the ungrammatical word in the
page copy (OK meta tags but as you always say, if it's not in the page
copy, you haven't optimised for it)...?
Thanks for any guidance.
Jo Barker
Families Online Web Editor
http://www.familiesonline.co.uk
~~~Heather's Response~~~
Hi, Jo,
That's a great question.
I asked Detlev Johnson, Vice President of Position Technologies about
the apostrophe issue. The search engines generally consider an
apostrophe (like with children's clothes) a space. So, if you have
the word "children's clothes" within your body text copy, the search
engines might list your site if "children clothes" is queried. The 's'
would be ignored if it were in the search engine's stop word list.
Every case is different - check by using a test query and see if the
number of documents returned is different.
You're right - people misspell queries all the time, or include
grammatically incorrect searches. However, you don't want to include
a misspelled word on your or the site - even if it's a keyword. Or,
include something grammatically incorrect (like "builders home
Colorado") in your body text. No matter what. After all, your
customers won't know that the misspelling or grammatical burp is for
search engine purposes only. They'll figure that the proofreader fell
asleep that day.
The Meta keyword tag *is* your solution for that situation. That's
where you can include keyword misspellings, as well as international
spelling variations (the word optimization vs. optimisation comes to
mind). So, if someone does type in a misspelling (or a spelling
variation), there is a possibility your site is listed.
However, let's say that your keyphrase can be spelled two different
ways, and they both pull strong results in WordTracker. If you want
to benefit from both keyphrase spellings, you can include one
particular spelling variation on the home page and use the second
spelling on an inner page. For more information about this, you can
read Rank Write issues 050 and 060.
Thanks for your question. Keep those SEO writing questions a-comin'!
Heather
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