Here is an experimental user contributed post. The reason why I say its experimental is because the post was originally written and sent to me by George Tucker from Intelligent Coffee. It’s a great article that really got me thinking about what is normally a pretty commonly discussed topic in SEO: typos and misspellings. From there I couldn’t help myself and had to add my own little ideabox into it. So here are both!

From George Tucker:
I once enjoyed #1 Google rankings for a misspelling that was only listed once on the page, and that was in the META keywords tag.

This particular website is a review site for anti-aging and anti-wrinkle skincare products (tons of bucks in that particular niche). I found that there were three different types of keywords that were relatively easy to rank:

- Brand names (lots of skin care brands don’t have a strong online presence)
- Scientific / chemical compound names (N-6 furfuryladenine, anyone?)
- Typos

Ranking for typos has become a fairly common concept, but there are three specific methods to generate typos and to make them more effective.

1. Do you habitually misspell a word? (For me, it’s caffiene.) Odds are, others do, too. Use WordTracker to generate a keyword list based on the proper spelling and use find/replace. Congratulations, you’ve just created your own sub-niche!

2. Can’t remember how to spell something? Take your best guess - then jot down your inadvertent misspelling. (Ridiculous numbers of people are trying to buy expresso machines.)

3. The simple transposition of letters due to typos. When you’re typing fast and you flub a word, make a note of it. (This is where my formerly-#1 ranking misspelling was born.)

To cast a wider net for typos, make use of an automatic typo generator like the Typo Trap. This particular tool generates typos based on accidentally hitting an adjacent key on a QWERTY keyboard while typing a search term. Because they’re auto-generated, the words don’t make much sense, but they’re good for machine-generated pages and sites. (I find the WordTracker misspelling generator to be completely worthless.)

Typos are an excellent example of the long tail, and one that’s fairly easy to exploit. Often, they’re low-hanging fruit. Keep track of your own typos and sprinkle them throughout your white hat sites. Generate random typos and plug them into your keyword.txt file for machine-generated sites.

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Great article. Thanks George! I’ll keep my portion short.

As mentioned there are quite a few typo generators available to try such as Typo Trap. However if you’re an automation junkie like myself and are actually looking for a nice list you should try this…
1. Open Microsoft Word on your computer
2. Click Tools.
3. Click Autocorrect Options
4. Look towards the bottom of the dialog box

Microsoft was kind enough to provide a nice big list of the most common misspellings and typos in the English language! The downside? No mass select or copy and paste on the list. Yeah bummer right?! Try going to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/207748 and getting the macro utility. Export your autocorrect db using the macro utility and then see what happens when you open it up in a text editor. :)

Outside Resources
Wikipedia’s List of Common Mispellings - Scrapable version.
Your Dictionary 100 Most Common Mispelled Words

Food For Thought
How about celebrity names and brand names?