Copy Editing and Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization)Can having a lot of spelling and grammar errors really affect your website’s rankings on Google or other search engines?The short answer, it seems, is YES. There are many factors that go into Google’s decision on how high a website will be placed on the search results list when searching for a particular search term. One of the factors involved in the calculation is the “quality” or “authorship” of the website from a reader’s perspective. Google actually employs librarians to aid its engineers and programmers, and its web ranking algorithms factor in the typographical and/or spelling errors that it finds on your site. A couple of typographical or spelling errors per page may be all right, but more than that and your site may wind up being penalized in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). The premise is that if your website has multiple errors, you, as website owner, don’t care enough to put in the extra effort to make it a high-quality, readable site. Well then, Google doesn’t want to recommend it to their users either and so might not rank it as highly as a well-written site with equal content and other factors. I remember finding a website about ten years ago which had errors all through it, with errors ranging from simple spelling to ridiculous grammatical mistakes which no one who writes should be making. I tried to go through the site, as they had information which I needed, but after a few minutes, I exited. The owners of the site had put the website up hastily and hadn’t read their copy. Well, I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, read it either. Interestingly, some people actually intentionally misspell some of their keywords on occasion – when people do searches, it is common for them to misspell their search terms. The idea is to have some of those misspellings on the website so that the search engines will pick them up. These days, though, this may do more harm than good, as all the major search engines automatically suggest the correct spellings of the entered search terms. That SEO misspelling technique is becoming much less effective, and, especially if overdone, can make for a painful reading experience. My suggestion is that, if you’ve put time, energy, effort and money into your website, you want people to read and re-read it, tell their friends, and then come back again. So, how can you improve your website’s appeal to both your readers and to search engines?Run Spell Check multiple times - every time you make changes, in fact. Remember, also, that some words may be spelled correctly, but, in the context of your document, may be the wrong words or require different spellings (see the articles on Homonyms!). Run grammar check programs or have someone copy edit and proofread your website. One of the ways to optimize your copy for the search engines is to work relevant key words and phrases into your website pages (something we can help you do, too) so that readers searching for your subject matter will be able to find you. There are a myriad other optimization techniques that are beyond the scope of this article and my copyediting services, but there are companies out there that can help you with that. Thanks very much to my partner Dave for help with some of the technical aspects of this article. He’s an IT professional and did the website development and SEO for this site. We could perhaps collaborate and do the full copy editing and SEO for your site, if you like. Search engine optimization really does work - after all, you did find us through a search engine, right?! Contact me if you have any questions or have ideas for other articles you'd like to see. Back to the Articles list page. |
