SEO Tip: Using Grammatically Incorrect Keywords

The foundation for a good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy always starts with keyword research. The strategy behind the usage of the determined keywords is what helps get you ranked in the search engines, get more traffic, and make more sales.

Searchers however don’t always enter grammatically correct terms into their favorite search engine, which leaves bloggers and website owners wrestling with terms like “divorce lawyer New York” or “men’s shorts pink.” Trying to construct a sentence around such terms will leave you sounding as if English is your third language, and won’t exactly encourage trust from your readers.

Worse yet are the misspellings. Take for example “loose weight” – believe it or not, it’s a highly searched keyword phrase. Using the misspelled term and improper phrase in a sentence will not only challenge your creative writing skills, but more importantly, it could diminish your credibility as an expert or authority in the field.

While potential customers who may not know or care about spelling or being grammatically correct when searching the internet, I can bet they won’t look at you with the same respect when you can’t even spell or use common industry terms properly.

So how can you use highly searched keywords when they are misspelled or grammatically incorrect without sounding like you failed ninth-grade English class?

Incorrect grammar is simple to deal with when you realize that search engines don’t see most punctuation. This is good news for bloggers, because now instead of writing:

This year for Valentine’s Day give him men’s shorts pink to help him get in the spirit

you can write:

With spring just around the corner, the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day is men’s shorts. Pink may not be what he would choose for himself, but it’s just the color to get him in the mood this year.

Both options contain the keyword, but only one makes sense to humans. The search engines will ignore the period and see only the keyword (they even ignore paragraph breaks) so you no longer have to sacrifice good grammar for high rankings.

Spelling errors can be a bit more difficult to handle, but still workable. Here is an example of how I might use the term “loose weight” so that it makes sense to human readers.

After strict orders from the doctor to watch what I eat I’m happy to say that I dropped 10 pounds in 3 weeks and now many of my outfits no longer look good on me because they’re too loose.

Weight maintenance is the next order of business on my health agenda. I’ve heard that maintaining my weight loss can be just as hard if not harder than actually losing the weight.

Since search engines ignore periods and paragraph breaks, the above example demonstrates how you can take advantage of highly searched keyword terms that are in reality misspellings (loose weight).

I hope this SEO tip helps the next time you find that the best keywords for your page are not the easiest to use.

photo credit: Omad