Misspelled word helps boost traffic and SEO for website
09/22/08
A few days ago I posted my opinion on how the OJ Simpson case was going to unfold. In that article, I accidently misspelled OJ’s last name in the title of the article. The misspelling in the title, also caused the name of the webpage to be misspelled, as well as submissions to social bookmarking sites.
I had no idea I had made this error, but I did notice one thing… immediate traffic. You can see in the address bar of my article (found here) that the name “Simpson” is spelled “Simson”. Well it turns out the competition for websites writing about or giving info about OJ Simpson is a lot lighter for the commonly mistaken spelling of his last name.
I immediately started receiving diggs at digg.com . I also started receiving search hits on search engines for the term “OJ SIMSON TRIAL”. Quite an amazing find for an accidental miss of the “p” button. A 20% increase in traffic compared to the few days before and the few days after the mistake.
Now this is just speculation, because I do not have the same article on another page with the correct spelling, but it seems to me that the traffic increase is due to the mispelling and not the topic. Being a newer website, I don’t think I can get anywhere near the top of a search engine on OJ Simpson. There are just way too many other websites with the correct spelling. As a matter of fact, if you do a Google search for “OJ Simpson”, it says there are over THREE MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND results. The same search for “OJ Simson” brings back only about 50,000 results… about 14% of the correct spelling of his name.
I would have to do some more research to decide if the misspelling is worth any possible downside, but it seems to me I came out a winner on this one. For newer or smaller websites and blogs, this could be way to compete with the big boys. If you have any experience with this type of thing let me know. In the near future I may give this a better test, with duplicate pages and different titles. Could be some interesting results.
Tags: SEO, Website Development