Search Engine Optimisation
Website Marketing and Promotion

Website Search Engine Optimisation Tips

Search Engine Optimisation and Spelling

There is nothing more annoying than coming across grammar and spelling mistakes on a Web page. The Website is immediately devalued in the visitor's eyes.

The number of spelling errors found on the Web is high. Programmers are good at technical issues, but spelling is seldom one of their strengths. The spelling of each Web Page should be checked thoroughly.

Spelling mistakes can be avoided by:

• Asking a gimlet-eyed English teacher or a professional proof-reader to proof-read the text.
• Copying each Web page to Notebook, and then checking the spelling and grammar with Microsoft Word.
• Using the free AddIn for ASP.Net Spell checker which will help to avoid most problems.
• The best method of checking spelling is to use a bulk spelling checker.

Deliberate Misspelling

Misspelled words are not likely to be helpful in attracting visitors.

The idea seems plausible enough. Misspelled words that are frequently used by visitors are inserted into a Web page. If the Website is the only one to contain these misspellings, then the Website will achieve a higher hit rate.

But misspellings do not attract visitors – the Search Engines are clever enough to ignore the error, and will substitute the correct word. Any visitor to the Web page is unlikely to be impressed by spelling and grammatical errors. An unprofessional Website is unlikely to be trusted, and the visit will be short.

As an example, a visitor found my programming Website using this phrase "LEARNIGN VB IS EASY?". The Search Engine was intelligent enough to list the Visual Basic Website on page one of the organic search results. The Web page would not have looked good with "learnign". BTW, the answer was that learning Visual Basic.Net involves "a huge learning curve".

Australian and USA spelling

To ensure an Australian audience, I have consistently used the British spelling of "Optimisation". This Table shows the difference in the number of results for the two different spellings, as returned by Google.

At one stage, Google used to return much the same numbers for each spelling. Now due to localisation with more relevant and local results, the numbers are very different for each spelling. This could be due to most people using "optimization" rather than "optimisation" when they search.