Fat Finger SEO

I can say that because:
1.) I have fat fingers,
2.) I am just as guilty as everyone else.

Simply put, not everyone is a typist and we sometimes mis-spell a word or URL as we enter the text into the browser or search box.

There are many who think that going after these people is a waste of time since almost all search engines recognize gramatical errors and make suggestions to the user. But sometimes there are various spellings of a word, and you need to optimize for all of them.

A great example of this are the variant uses of the following word:

Wheel Chair
Wheelchair
wheel-chair

Which one is correct? According to Google "WheelChair" is the suggested term. But in the search results, "Wheel Chair" has 76,300,000 million results, "Wheelchair" has 61,500,000 results, and "Wheel-chair" has 50,700,000 results.

But to the user, any one of those spellings could be correct, and as long as they ultimately find what they are looking for, why should they care which way it gets spelled?

In today's SEO game, you need to optimize for all three spellings if you truly want to own that keyword/phrase. The best way to achieve this is to make sure that you have all the variants of the word in your page copy, meta tags, page title and every place that you can insert those spellings without producing a spammy, keyword stuffed page.

While you will always need to fight the battle of user-friendly design versus search engine readability, in the end, it's about your users, and they are the ones who will purchase your product or service.

-To your online success!

Paul Bliss
www.SEOforGoogle.com

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