One SEO tactic that many web site owners use is to include in their keyword lists spelling variations and misspellings of keywords. Google may be in the process of circumventing that approach to keyword optimization.

Matt Cutts has a regular video on Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube Channel where he answers questions posed by users. The question answered in the latest video involved changes to Google’s “Did you mean” that often appears at the top of search results.

In the past, if you entered in a search term with a misspelled word, Google would return results for the misspelled word along with that “Did you mean” link to search results for the correct spelling.

What has now changed is that Google will display the top two results for the corrected spelling before listing the results for the misspelled query. This is significant for a number of reasons. First, if the user has misspelled the word then they are more likely to click on one of those two results before clicking on the “Did you mean” link.

If you have optimized for misspellings then you may just find your traffic starting to drop from those misspelled searched. Since Google is displaying the top results for that keyword, it makes even more important to be at number one or two for the correctly spelled keyword. Even if a user does misspell the word, your page will appear at the top of the results.

This is a small but significant change to Google’s approach to search results and perhaps the first step to making keyword optimization for misspelled words redundant. You can guarantee that if this new approach is successful, Google will expand it, possibly showing the top five results.

The one thing is obvious from a small change like this, when it comes to SEO, keyword research and search engine optimization, the work is never done.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 3:53 am and is filed under Keyword Research, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.