If you’ve been looking at SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) keyword suggestions to put the icing on your search engine optimisation cake, you may have come across the idea of incorporating misspelled keywords to capture a slice of the search market.

But is bad keyword spelling really useful or does it just make your website look unprofessional?

The answer to this question depends on your point of view. Just take a look at any keyword tool and you’ll see that intentional misspellings account for a significant proportion of searches online. So, including misspelled keywords can be useful, allowing you to:

• Target searches that are commonly misspelled, for instance ‘accomodation’ instead of ‘accommodation’
• Get good search engine rankings for profitable popular search terms that have low levels of competition
• Capture the market for regional spelling variations, eg. both UK and US spellings of words such as ‘optimisation’ (’optimization’)
  
• Help searchers find what they’re looking for, even if they enter a word incorrectly

But along with these benefits, there are also disadvantages to including misspellings or alternate spellings in your website copy - the most obvious being that visitors and potential clients will see your website (and therefore your business) as sloppy, careless or… lacking in basic spelling skills. Even worse, you may end up losing your search engine friendly status if you, or your Web designer, try to fool search engines with invisible text or other keyword tricks.

Find some of the best SEO consultants in New Zealand in the NZS.com directory.

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