Typographical Errors - Capturing misspelt words in your SEO program

Fremantle or Freemantle? Typographic errors due to rushing or fat fingers on a keyboard, difficult or hard to spell words, or foreigners of different nationalities attempting words that they may have only heard spoken provides an avenue for picking up stray search attempts.

When preparing your list of keywords consider the variations and attempts that people may make. Particularly review your search stats for the website/page after a few months to determine the attempts that have been made and cater for these if you sense a fair proportion of searchers may continue to err.

This is particularly useful in a tightly competed SEO field – where millions of dollars may be spent on obtaining top position for a particular phrase or keyword, you can skirt the outside of the pack and pick up many stragglers attempting to access that phrase but who just didn’t quite get it right.

Keywords - plurals, singular, misspelt...

Consider the benefit of adding plurals and/or slight variations e.g. both Australia Australian. The vast majority of search results seem to focus upon returning results for the plural version of the word, instead of the singular version. Providing results that are singular or plural will provide more relevant results for a searcher than if the search engine had just returned results for the version that a searcher entered into a search box.

Also worth noting is where Google’s Algorithm highlights synonyms. Also the degree to which we understand synonyms changes and improves, and this can affect the impact on highlighting the terms. The main point is that the algorithm does change. Google mostly highlights stems, not synonyms, but the distinction is lost on most people. Stemming on Google isn't new. The company has been doing it since back in 2003. It was also highlighting stemmed words back then, too. If you searched for "running," and it found a page with the word "run," the word "run" would be bolded in the search listing description.

Consider using keywords that are misspelled or mistyped. With a business name or product name, consider how people may say it, or sound it out, and thus interpret the spelling of that word.

Do use a combination of very unique and more general words to describe the contents of your page.

Consider using keywords related to something else your prospect would buy or search for.(related phrases)

Once you have completed your brainstorming and have compiled your list of 5-10 core keywords, it’s time to move on and expand that list. A list of 5-10 search phrases will generally not bring the amount of search engine traffic needed to make your website successful. However, that list will be a vital tool when determining which phrases to add to the mix. At this point, you need to turn to the search engines themselves and research which search phrases are actually being typed into Google, Yahoo, Bing et al. While few search engines will openly tell you which search phrases are the most often searched, there are several very useful tools you can use to expand your list of keyword popularity.