Dsigning and Messpililng Wbsites wtih the Bset of Tehm(Misspelling websites with the best of
them.) By Timothy Fish 02/03/2005 A Working Site DescriptionThe Purpose of this site is to provide cherch webmasters with guidelines for desgnnig curch wbsites. No, that doesn't seem right. Let me try it again. The perpuss of this websight is to provide curch wbmasters with guidelines for designing cherch websites. No, that isn't right either. Let me try it for a different web site. The purpose of this web sight is to help people to find churchs in the fort worth area. No, one more time. The purpose of this web site is to help people to find churches in the Frot Worth area.
Using Misspelling to Make Your PointHave you ever looked at a website and gotten the impression that the webmaster either had never gone to school or he really didn't care. Many of these websites are trying to sell something useless, like a year's supply of vitamins or something. Some webmasters use tactics to get traffic that involves misspelling words. The idea is that many people will either make a mistake while typing, will not know how to spell a word or will use the wrong word. Some sites have several different pages with nearly the same information but with different "mistakes" in the pages. A person looking for a calendar might find a "Cowlendar" instead. While the "Cowlendar" site didn't have a chance of being found if the person had known how to spell, it has a better than average chance of being found with the misspelling. It is impossible to make your point if you can't be found, so misspelling can work. The Problems of MisspellingMisspelling is not without its problems. Yes, it can bring traffic to your site, but it can be difficult to implement effectively. While there is only one way to spell most words correctly, there is an infinite number of ways to misspell the same word. Suppose I want to misspell the words "web site design." The following is a list of some of the possible ways to do this:
The list could go on for pages and I still would not have listed all of the possibilities. The problem of the webmaster who wishes to use misspelling is to select the words that are mispelled often enough to bring visitors, but not so often that other websites will appear in the search results in front of him. Another problem is that some words that could be used are undesireable words when mispelled. Some words take on new meanings and are valid words for other search results. For example, a person typing "words" might type "works." Unusual WordsA person might try using unusual words in a website, such as "demirep", which is a person whose reputation you doubt, but what good would it do you? How many people would be looking for "demirep" unless they were looking for the definition? The other problem with this is that the unusual words need to be related to the topic. A better approach is to just find words that mean almost the same thing as your topic. For "web site design" I might use web location design, web page design, World Wide Web design, Internet Site Design, Web document design, web site configuration, web site construction or any number of other terms to both gain importantance in the search engine rankings and to make sure that I have the words that people are looking for.
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