GMChost.com Webmaster Guide

Until every search engine dynamically underlines and corrects misspelled words in the search box, people will continue to make mistakes when searching. Because millions of searches are conducted each day on the major search engines, a percentage will contain misspellings.

Since most Webmasters spell check their pages, relatively few sites come up for common misspellings. This makes it easy to achieve top rankings on commonly misspelled words that apply to your Web site. This translates into easy traffic.

However, how do you optimize for these words without affecting the quality of your site by riddling it with misspellings? The safest way is to include the misspellings in areas of the page that are not visible to the end user such as:

1) Meta keyword tag
2) Meta description tag
3) Meta http-equiv tag
4) Image ALT tags
5) Image file names
6) NOFRAMES area
7) Style tag
8) Form option text
9) Comment tags (Unfortunately, most major engines ignore comment tags today)

Ideally you'd include the misspellings in the title and body areas too. However, you could end up hurting the image of your site, so I don't suggest that if you can achieve the rankings without showing the misspellings to the user. Although still visible to the user, you could misspell the page name and/or the directory that the page appears in on your site. Most people do not pay attention to the name of the page at which they are looking, nor do they care how it's spelled.

There are other techniques that some people use to include misspelled words on the page while keeping them out of view of the average visitor. For example, some Web marketers make the font color and background color of their page very similar (like white and off-white) so that the keywords are virtually unreadable by humans but still seen by the search engines. However, if you try this, you must avoid using colors that are identical. The search engines look for this and consider it to be spam.

In fact, if a human reviewer from a search engine checks your page, it's possible they may flag you for spamming if they notice you're hiding keywords using identical or very similar colors. In the case of optimizing for misspellings, it's more of a gray area. If the words apply to your site's content, and also appear in their correctly spelled form on the visible portion of the same page, many people would consider the technique a perfectly reasonable solution. However, the safest methods are to embed keywords in the meta tags, ALT tags, etc.

To obtain a list of commonly misspelled words that apply to your Web site, conduct some searches on this free service:
http://www.searchspell.com/typo/

SearchSpell uses a database of actual misspellings, which can be very useful for identifying misspellings that may not have occurred to you. Unfortunately, this service does not tell you how often people misspell each variation so you know which variations to focus the bulk of your efforts. For this type of detailed information, see WordTracker:
http://www.wordtracker.com/freetrial.htm