Search Engine Optimization and English Spelling

Recently I was analyzing keywords used by the visitors to search my website and thought of discussing some issues related to spelling with other people.

I found many people coming to my website are not using the correct spellings while searching in the search engines. It is fact that a large number of people who use internet through out the world do not have good knowledge of English. You may found lot of people of China, India, France, Germany, Russia and many other countries do lack in using correct English spellings.


Another problem is different spellings used by UK English and International English. When web masters optimize their websites they pick the most commonly used terms and phrases with respect to their websites and they either follow the UK English or International English and they optimize the sites accordingly. But for instance if you are following UK English, your site may not be come up on top ranking for the corresponding International English keyword. Some common examples are Organization and Organization, Optimization and Optimization, color and color etc. etc.

I found many webmasters follow the following techniques to avoid the above problems:-

1. Use the variant spelling of the keywords in the meta tags
2. Use all possible variants and misspelled words in the main body
3. Some people mask the misspelled words that are they use the same color of the text as their page color hence not visible to human but can crawled by search engine bots.
   

But I feel all the above tricks are no longer useful as google do not give much importance to meta tags now a days, no one would like putting misspelled words in the main body and the last one is strongly not recommended as many search engine do not like this approach and may exclude your website from their index.

What is the Best Approach?

I recommend the following two approaches to address the issue:-

1. use the wrong or misspelled words in the Alt tags of your images, as many search engines index the alt tags.
2. Off Page Factors, while doing link building for your website, you can deliberately use the wrong or misspelled words in the anchor text and it will solve your problem to a great extent.