Everyone wants to get high rankings in search engines for the right audience. Because the top ten slots have, approriately, only ten positions, it becomes quite a challenge to have your site show up on this crucial first (or second, or third) page. How can you improve your rankings?

Search engine secrets are all the rage in many publicity-oriented sites. Metatags! Header tags! Keywords!

Guess what they're all missing?

Misspellings!

Think of it. The majority of people out there are not exactly contenders for the National Spelling Bee contest. Many times, people will either mistype or just plain misspell certain keywords when searching on the Internet.

Need proof?

Go to Altavista and search for:

Relators (notice the misspelling)

Lo and behold! While many of the documents returned are not relevant, several are from actual REALTORS like Coldwell Banker Holtzman .

Ready for another example? During the holidays, I decided to have a sale on my first system, The Internet Recruiting Edge. I created several pages for this bonanza, and submitted them to search engines. Much to my confusion, I started receiving hits from Altavista when folks queried on

christmast gifts

Now, my page had the word "Christmas" spelled correctly on both the title and description, but, I learned, I misspelled my keywords and included "christmast" as the first word for that particular metatag. And that misspelling had me ranked on the number one top ten page!

This crystalized for me the importance of targeting all possible permutations of your keywords when designing your site. Maybe you can't achieve a top ten position for a keyword combination like

NJ realtors

Along with other suggestions, why not create a page or two that targets

NJ relators

You'd be suprised at the results.

Published: February 5, 1999

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Barbara Ling, "The Internet Virtual Coach", is an Internet business and technology writer and trainer. She is the author of "The Real Estate Pro's Internet Edge." Contact Barbara at btl@virtual-coach.com.