SEO Advice: Spell-Check Your Website

Here's some quick advice. If you're going to ask people to give you money, spell-check your site. For example, here's a banner from an SEO site I heard about:

It should be spelled "guarantee," not "garuntee." By the way, I can hear the Kentuckian jokes now, and you can just stop. Worst-case, ask a friend to look over your site for typos just like you would with a resume. If your objective is to get someone to give you money, the effort is definitely worth it.

If you have a UNIX webhost, there are a variety of programs that can spell-check your docs, including spell or ispell. If you search for [spell check web page], you can also find sites that offer spell-checking of live web pages. I found and tried this service in five minutes and it worked fine. You get a useful service for free, and they offer the option to upgrade to a paid package. Offering a useful service to visitors is a great way to attract repeat visitors and links. There's often a lot of room for improving on existing services, too. For example, the free tool I found flagged a lot of words like Abondance, Harmonix, JavaScript, etc. It would be an easy improvement over that free tool if you added an option to ignore words that were capitalized, for example. There's also the spell-check on webforms that the Google Toolbar offers, and there are numerous plugins for stuff like WordPress that does spell checking.

John Walker has an interesting method of dealing with typos: one strike and you're out. Essentially, you stop reading a message after the first misspelling you hit. On a quick sample of Slashdot discussion, he found that

a total of 34 words were read before the respective messages struck out, from a total of 444 words in the original postings (not counting headers or identification information). Striking out the messages thus eliminated more than 90% of the text you'd otherwise have read...

All the more reason to spell well.