Spelling the way to search engine success
When I worked with the interactive (web and internet) departments of some ad agencies, we had at least one person whose whole job was quality control. They went through the code after we finished with it and cleaned up anything that wasn’t right. The age of Dreamweaver was sort of like the digital photography takeover. Almost anyone could do it, but overall quality fell. The error was believing that the search engines would find a way to tolerate the sloppy code and still produce great rankings - or even want to. That was quaint but not true.
Good clean code still helps with search engine rankings. I have at times given in to quantity over quality and it’s bit me most every time. Haste truly makes waste. Google, Yahoo, MSN et al still black mark bad code and things like misspellings. It’s not that they have the tolerance for error of teaching nuns - they frankly have no idea what a "webstie" is - nor do they care. Quality control lives.
Another problem with sloppy work is that once you discover it, you have to go through every page and correct the issues. Errors in spelling would be obvious to most of us, but errors in coding, while invisible to us, stand out like a flare to a machine reading the code as a text file - which is exactly what it is.
I recently read a page where the writer used every version of “there” - “there”, “their” and “they’re” and used everyone of them in the wrong context. Another used “your” for everything. “Your a great person, but I have no use for your poor grammar.” If you know where the error was in that sentence, you’re one of the majority, but that’s not good enough.
This is tough on those whose native language is not English, but some of the worst offenders seem to be those to whom English is a first language.
I have no doubt that I’ve made many of the same type of mistakes. I try to look over each article more than once and proof-read after letting the article sit for a while (it’s ALWAYS a bad idea to proof-read your own copy, but sometimes we are all we have).
The WYSIWYG editors of most of the Open Source web solutions we recommend have a built-in spell checker. That can help a lot.
But don’t always rely on the spell check function. Spell check is great, but it can’t tell that “tome” is wrong when you meant “to me.” Some of the worst atrocities can be traced to copying from a spell- and grammar-checked Word doc and then pasted into a WYSIWYG editor. This would very likely produce mostly accurate spelling and grammar, but could also produce butchered code that would display very messily in a web browser.
So take a little time before you hit the “Publish” button. Run spell check, correct any errors it finds, then save the page and walk away. Do something else before you proof-read. Or better yet, have someone else proof-read it.
