[Little A]

We set up a web page last year - lets call it www.webbpage.ie

We also bought www.webpage.ie in prder to allow for people who misspell the name, which redirects to the original page & works fine if someone types out the full name.

Unfortunately, if they only google "webpage" nothing comes up.

Will adding the misspelt name in as a keyword & maybe even placing it on the home page work or will Google just see it as a misspelling?

Can anyone offer any other way around this - pls go easy as not too savvy in regard to web & google?

Also, is there a limit to the number of keywords you can have?

Thanks in advance

[TsuDhoNimh]

Originally Posted by Little A

Unfortunately, if they only google "webpage" nothing comes up.

It's difficult to comment on this one in general, a lot will depend on the specifics of the keywords you're talking about.

In most cases, you'd hope for Google to suggest the alternative correct spelling to the user. If it's a brand term rather than a real word, this will only occur when your brand gains a larger volume of searches and Google are receiving enough signals to recognise that term as a brand (difficult).

Originally Posted by Little A

Will adding the misspelt name in as a keyword & maybe even placing it on the home page work or will Google just see it as a misspelling?

This would work in terms of making the page relevant for that search query. So if there's nothing showing up for the term at the moment, I wouldn't worry about placing it on the homepage (focus this on the more competitive and important keywords) and instead have it present on a lower priority page.

(Just to be clear: By keyword here I'm assuming you're talking about the words that the text on the page is targeting, rather than the "meta keywords" tag. If you do mean the meta keywords, then no it wouldn't help. Google ignore meta keywords to avoid people stuffing the tag to try and gain traffic from searches which the page is irrelevant for)

Originally Posted by Little A

Can anyone offer any other way around this - pls go easy as not too savvy in regard to web & google?

You've already pretty much nailed it. If you want your site to show for a specific keyword, then make that keyword visible on your site. Whether the traffic you'd earn from the misspelling is significant enough to warrant using it is another question entirely.

Originally Posted by Little A

Also, is there a limit to the number of keywords you can have?

Again, are we talking about keywords used on the site or the keywords meta tag?

If the latter, ignore it. It's not going to help you and the only real impact it might have is flagging your site for manipulative behaviour if you use it poorly.

If in you mean in the text, there's a limit in how competitive your site will be if you spread yourself too thin on which keywords you're focusing on, but that limit would depend on your site and how authoritative it is. It would also depend on how competitive the keywords you're trying to rank for are. But the short answer is no, there's no 'limit'. Think of sites like wikipedia or amazon that rank for a huge variety and a vast number of keywords.

[Little A]

TsuDhoNimh - thank you so much, the world of web is getting clearer to me!!

In most cases, you'd hope for Google to suggest the alternative correct spelling to the user. If it's a brand term rather than a real word, this will only occur when your brand gains a larger volume of searches and Google are receiving enough signals to recognise that term as a brand (difficult).

It's actually a family name & ours is the more unusual spelling of it - say for example "Daley" as opposed to the more common "Daly" - The site is not likily to have huge traffic, but we obviously don't want to lose any potential customers (low volume, high priced product).

Thanks for highlighting the difference between the meta keyword & keywords - I wasn't aware of the difference so i will review all my text and make sure I have the most appropriate keywords incorporated into the text.

Which do you think would be better?
- to have as part of the text : "Daley's Shop (often refered to as Daly's Shop)
- to deliberately misspell the name at the bottom of the page

Also, does it have to be on the home page to highlight to Google as it would probably be easier to incorporate into the history page

Thanks again

[TsuDhoNimh]

Originally Posted by Little A

Which do you think would be better?
- to have as part of the text : "Daley's Shop (often refered to as Daly's Shop)
- to deliberately misspell the name at the bottom of the page

Also, does it have to be on the home page to highlight to Google as it would probably be easier to incorporate into the history page

I'd take care on the wording of it, the last thing you want to do is to actively encourage people to call you by the wrong name. The most important thing is that you're happy with how it comes across (e.g. it doesn't look like a careless typo on your site and is an intentional addition) and that it doesn't lead to confusion for your users.

The history page seems like a more appropriate location for me. You could introduce it there in a light-hearted and fun way, which also shows some of the charm of a family store (etc. etc.).

Having it on the homepage might allow Google to pick up on the change in text a little faster (the homepage will be the highest authority page on the vast majority of sites), but it's far from essential. Assuming the site doesn't have any indexing problems so far (e.g. if you do a "site:<yoursite.ie>" search on google do most of your pages show in the index?) the change on the history page should be picked up pretty fast.