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How do you reach a target audience for your business, products and services when they are unable to spell? Or an international market for whom English is not the first language and hence may not know the correct spelling of a word?

There seems to be a general decline in spelling and grammar, which appears to be accentuated by the proliferation of text messaging and abbreviations.

This is causing problems for website owners, who are faced with the dilemma of balancing the need to capture quality traffic through the search engines with common misspellings, but who do not want to put off those potential customers who may be affected by the inclusion of deliberately misspelled words on the website.

For many, poor punctuation, grammar and spelling can affect their judgement about the quality of products and services offered by the business behind the website. For instance, if easily avoided errors show in the website (such as poor spelling), then, so the thinking goes, similar errors may occur with product quality, or customer service.

The quandary then for website owners and SEO (search engine optimisation) experts is how to capture maximum traffic without creating a negative effect on sales and purchase decisions once the target audience has reached your website.

There is also an additional issue in that if your target audience is the “youf” market, or those in the 15-35 age range, you need to “spk da lngwij” (speak the language). You need to communicate with them in a way that helps them associate more closely with you and your products. This can include misspelling words, abbreviating terms or lingo.

One possible solution is to include the common mis-spellings of keywords discreetly. That is, in SEO important areas of the site but not in the visible text. This includes META tags, alt img text, HREF tags (eg filenames). These words will then be indexed by the search engines and improve natural search results, although will not hold as much weight as those which are also included in the visible text.

Another solution is to also include the words in a portion of text which is deliberately misspelt in a humorous manner. This will then not alienate those who may perceive that product and brand quality is affected by poor grammar and punctuation. Or you can deliberately aim landing pages at specific sectors of your target audience and market.

Whatever solution you choose, with the help of your search engineers, including more keywords in the text and SEO elements of your site, whether spelled correctly or not, can only help with natural searches.

Phil Robinson is an experienced online marketing consultant and Founder of ClickThrough Marketing – an international Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing agency. Specialists in Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click Marketing, Online PR, Social Marketing & Website Conversion Strategies.