60 Unique Visitors For A Few Seconds Work – My SEO Trick
I managed to get 60 visitors to the blog in roughly the last week with this little SEO trick… take a look…
Normally I don’t like using mis-spellings and I generally try to avoid them because I think the don’t look very professional.
However, I find it interesting that in this case the mis-spellings weren’t in the web-address of the blog post, or the title or even in the body of the post. Due to the sheer volume of people searching for the Google Chrome browser which was a “hot news item” last week, I managed to get 60 new visitors to the blog for a few mis-spellings which were only found in the first comment of the post… which means they never appeared on the homepage of the blog.
It was a matter of just a few seconds “work” to add the mis-spellings as a comment to the blog post.
What do you think? Are mis-spellings a traffic goldmine? Do you use them? Will this start a new craze of bloggers leaving mis-spellings in comments at their own blogs? 
September 10th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Great tip, Neil! Thanks for sharing this one with us.
Scott
September 10th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Hi Neil,
if I take a look at your stats, I see 60 visitors who hardly spent any time on your site, so I don’t think the effort is worth it, unless the goal is to blow-up page views.
Always my best,
John Vorwerk
September 10th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
That was very interesting. I never thought of doing it that way. I have sometimes added some misspelling at the bottom of the post like, “here are some other ways that people search for chrome, crome, chrom”. That is the way that I have done it. I like your way better, it keeps the post nice and clean. Will give it a try, thanks
Steve
September 10th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I don’t know about mis-spellings, but I sure wish online business owners would get over the idea that videos are God’s gift to internet marketing.
I would 100 times rather scan/read a quick posting and get to the point of the message than sit and watch a video that (generally) contains a bunch of unnecessary rambling and often doesn’t contain the real information until the very end.
September 10th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Hi Niel,
(Just kidding Neil)
I use them all the time for product review sites. You can list them in a glossary on your site.
Regards
James
September 10th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I often use the two different accepted spellings of “theater” and “theatre” on my site – perhaps I need to get creative with other mis-spelled versions of it and other terms related to my niche.
Thanks for the tip.
September 10th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I did this with PPC and it works, good tip.
Thanks
September 10th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
This is cutesy way of getting extra hits.
Do you feel that your name recognition and authority had anything to do with your ranking or are you discounting that relative to the usual search engine response?
Is there some place which lists common misspellings?
September 10th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Interesting technique, thanks for the tip
September 10th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Hey Neil! Great tip! I’ll definitely test it out on my blog. I do mostly video posts so it will be interesting to see how this comment tactic might increase my video views…
Thanks again!
Lon Naylor
http://screencastprofits.com/blog
September 10th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
good tip indeed, was thinking of including mispelings
for some time….thanks,
Marian
September 10th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Nice tip Neil, I’ll use this and see what happens.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
WoW! that is awesome tip! Thanks a lot for sharing.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
This is a great tip I used on my old one page physical product web site. I used it on the bottom like Steve mentioned above.
One draw back is; you will occasionally get a sarcastic email from people looking for something else.
I don’t use it on my new multi-page site right now, but I will give it a short test again for traffic increases.
Thanks
Craig
September 10th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
It is a good idea. I have heard about it in the past but never applied it. It is a little hard to decide how to misspell a word deliberately.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Ahhh, the old “mispelled” keyword trick, eh? Always works!
Thanks for the reminder.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
I will disconnect my Spell Checker immediatly! You never cease to amaze me with your knowledge!
Regards,
kn
September 10th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Thanks for the tip Neil,
It could prove useful if the post was relevant and the visitor stayed a bit. Anyway 60 views for a minutes work, you can’t really loose I guess, right?
Thanks again,
George
September 10th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
This is a great tip Neil,
thanks, l’m going to start trying this out, it could prove to be very useful.
September 10th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Not sure if I want that kind of traffic from people that can’t spell. Seems an unedumacated bunch anyway.
J/K
September 10th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
As stated above…Thanks! for the reminder. I had forgotten this little twist in the traffic game. I don’t agree, about videos, I’d rather watch an informative video so I can listen rather than having to read a long page.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Awesome video and even better results. Sometimes I cannot believe the information you give away for free.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Great idea putting it in the comments. Just don’t do it on too many posts or it really will stand out as fake.
September 11th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Hi Neil
Thanks for a really useful tip, I will give it a try on my new blog. Every little bit helps – Jago
September 11th, 2008 at 8:14 am
It might be useful, but for it to be really useful we need to study into common typo mistakes.
September 11th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Hi guys,
Thanks for all the positive feedback.
Regarding video… I agree, if it’s over 10 minutes, I’d rather skim the written notes. What I try to do is keep the videos short and provides notes too. If you read the post, you’ll get the idea, even if you don’t watch the video.
If you don’t want to put mis-spellings on your site, you could potentially setup a blog at blogger.com, wordpress.com or pages at squidoo or hubpages and include a few accidental typos there… or in comments at other people’s blogs.
I don’t think you need to think *too much* about possible mis-spellings. Just imagine how *you* may mis-spell a word. I type “broswer” all the time
and imagining people would spell “chrome” as “crome” or “chrom” doesn’t take much time.
Neil.
September 11th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I treat misspellings as a kind of long tail traffics, so if your site gets a lot of hits from long tail keywords, this may work for you.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
I think it is a valid strategy for PPC advertising but I am not sure about deliberate spelling mistakes visible on your web site.
September 11th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
This is a good reminder to use mis-spellings in different ways. I am already thinking up ideas to contain these within site pages but without affecting the main text content. Thanks for putting the idea into my head.
Paul
September 11th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Name recognition may have had a little to do with it:) but I would use this with caution, especially for those whose first language isn’t English.
Grasping the nuances of English is hard enough, pretending to misspell words when taken out of context to begin with isn’t going to help much.
Reading some of the responses here attests to this one point.
Otherwise, used cautiously and tested with your own particular audience is the best way to determine its effectiveness.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
I have been trying to catch people misspelling words for years, often by creating a misspelt page – e.g. http://www.slowdating.com/Speed_dating/Speedating.aspx
Rock on Neel
September 11th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
keep the speling tipps cumming Neale !
September 11th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
I also used to use this in my PPC campaigns for an old site of mine and got really cheap keywords too – not sure why I don’t now… Great tip – nice to keep it out of your main post for your RSS readers.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
I’m not so sure about using mis-spellings. Yes you’ll get more raw traffic but it won’t be targeted meaning when a person lands on your site looking for Google Chrome, they’ll immediately leave. This would lead to a high bounce rate wouldn’t it?
September 12th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I agree with the above post, it is not targeted traffic and will lead to a high bounce rate. Unless your blog is so good they forget about what they were looking for in the first place
Though they still might click your Adsense ads in the process of leaving.
September 12th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
I agree. The idea is not to get fixated on the specific mis-spellings I used, but the fact that mis-spellings found only in the blog comment managed to draw traffic. Now consider if someone posted a comment to your “affiliate marketing blog” and accidentially typed “afiliate marketing”…
Neil.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Neal:-)
I like this idea. Will definitely be trying it on my blog. Comments may not count against the validity of the content provided.
Jean (also spelled Jeanne, Gene, Jen, etc.)
September 12th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
I have also received traffic from misspelled words but it does not look very professional in the body of an article. Like someone mentioned; you could put them at the end of the post with something like, this topic is commonly misspelled like this, blah blah blah. I try to proof everything and use spell check before publishing a post. You can get some good traffic from misspelled keywords though. Try Keyword Elite and check the misspelled words box. I was surprised at the number of searches for misspelled keywords.
September 12th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I really love the idea! I never tried this before but I found it interesting so, I will surely use that.
September 13th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
That’s really great idea, Thanks Neil for sharing this with us. I’m looking forward to see your future posts
September 14th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Mis-spellings will look unprofessional, especially on corporate sites, but no doubt it is a good traffic generator.
September 15th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Neil,
Interesting “outside the box” post.
You’ve convinced me to let my four-year old start posting entries to my blogs. I’ll also let her write my browser and page titles.
September 16th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Cool nice tip, you can also do the same by making mispellings in anchor texts.
September 16th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Neil,
great idea.i would love to try it once and wait for the results..
September 16th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Good tip! Especially for long or difficult words, I can see how you can capture a bit of traffic for subjects you blog about. I think I’ll try that and see what the results are.
September 17th, 2008 at 4:50 am
Great post Neil. I never thought of intentionally mispelling a keyword in my blog posts. I guess because I’m such a bad speller anyways, and my wife would never let me get away with it
September 17th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Hi Vols, including mis-spelling in the title is also one way of attracting such traffic. Good one.
Rif Chia
September 17th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
I am looking for 30-40 people to visit my blog…However, i want them to stay there and comment…Rather, then just drop in and thats it…
September 18th, 2008 at 6:27 am
I assumed Google only indexed the content of the post rather than the comments too.
I have purposely put in alternative spellings of keywords on occasion not to trick people into finding me, but to attract the widest range of people looking for the information I have.
I’ll definitely give the comments technique a try. It sure isolates the alternative spellings in a more organized way.
September 21st, 2008 at 5:48 pm
I not sure whether this is work because those mis-spelling words are seldom search by user. However, I would like to try on it and see the effectiveness.
Thanks for sharing your experience
September 23rd, 2008 at 3:10 am
Mis-spellings indeed bring in organic traffic too, however it does not cover a huge percentage. One thing to take note is: This mis-spelling traffic actually represent searcher who are also looking for something in mind that your website has to offer.
Roger Hamilton
September 24th, 2008 at 11:30 am
We’ve used misspelling in English and in German and it has brought us traffic in the past.
And it still does today, so we keep using this technique.