Spellmeleon Assists Savvy Search Marketers

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

A good amount of the time Matt Cutts shares some really useful stuff. Like Tuesday.

While there are some really good tidbits in that blog post, I’d like to focus on just one thing that has probably been talked about to death over the years but that is still worth a good discussion now and then. The issue is misspelled words. I really like the feature he calls “Spellmeleon”. If you misspell a word in your search query Google will ask if you meant such-and-such and then give you some results based on that. But Spellmeleon actually provides a better service.

With Spellmeleon you still get the “did you mean …” but you also get results for your original query, indicating that Google will honor your request and let you make the decision on whether or not the misspelling is intentional rather than deciding that for you. Why is this important? For a couple of reasons.

First, as a searcher, I might have intentionally searched for the misspelling. The suggestion to add the + sign before the query is nice, but not everyone is advanced enough to know to do that. Still, it should be my decision. My search query, remember?

Secondly, from an SEO perspective, targeting misspellings is a valid strategy. After all, people do misspell words in their search queries, either intentionally or unintentionally. Therefore, a savvy search marketer can use that to his advantage. And Google allowing results to get through for those misspellings is a smart move. Even though Matt Cutts calls such marketers spammers. It isn’t spam. It’s just good marketing strategy.