What are misspelled keywords?

Misspelled keywords are keywords containing typos, like “saerch engine” vs. “search engine.” Previously, SEOs would target misspelled keywords because search engines focused on returning content that used those exact phrases versus recognizing the spelling error and then returning relevant content.

Why target misspelled keywords in SEO?

People initially targeted misspelled keywords in SEO because of how search engines operated. In the early days of the Internet, search engines couldn’t detect and correct typos. When someone searched “cd playre,” that’s the phrase they saw and searched for in their indexes. So, SEOs responded by creating content targeting the most popular keyword misspellings. Of course, that’s not how search engines operate today. Now, they can detect typos and gauge what someone is really searching for, like “cd player” vs. “cd playre.” Besides suggesting the corrected keyword, search engines will also display the correctly spelled search results — a significant shift from previous years. So, that’s why people used to target misspelled keywords — and why they shouldn’t anymore.