But did you know that this very common human frailty has created some significant marketing opportunties?
You see, thousands of people are misspelling search terms ... and many are tripped up by the same words, creating little 'mini-markets' of opportunity (and sometimes not so little).
Cashing in on these hidden opportunities is just a matter of doing some digging with Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
How about some real-life examples:
* Type in the term, "se*arch eng*ine", correctly, and you will find that nearly 1,500,000 people searched that term at Overture in a recent month. Now search for that term over at Google and you will come up with over 4,700,000 results.
That's alot of competition!
But in people's haste, 4,561 typed in, "seach engine", by mistake. Check that term in Google and there are less than 56,000 results!
Sticking with this theme, 2,372 people also typed in "search engin". And if this many people are doing it at Overture, it's likely that many, many more are doing it at Google.
Are there others in this niche? You bet! Just go digging.
Are there some in your niche? Very likely. Here's some more examples:
* Type in "online casino" correctly at Overture and you get over 2,700,000 searches ... and over 1,800,000 results at Google! Again, tons of competition.
But "onlin casino" had 3,420 searches and only 8,800 Googleresults. "Online casin" gets another 1,096 searches and "online gamling" chips in with another 2,119.
Smart marketers in this niche could be gaining new, highly- targeted visitors by creating pages optimized for these misspelled terms (more on this in a moment).
More examples?
* You know all that sp*am we get about via*gra? Well, spam*mers could locate people who are really interested by doing a little homework here as well. Nearly 2,000 people a month type in "viagar" and there are less than 4,500 Google results for this term, as opposed to 5,500,000 for the correctly spelled term.
* In the music business? Well, over 1,500 typed in "mucic", resulting in only 10,800 Google results as opposed to the normal 105,000,000!
I think you get the idea. What business are you in? What are the most popular search terms for your niche? Have you checked for common misspellings?
I happened to discover this tendency for misspellings totally by accident ... I misspelled something while doing some research at Overture.
And I inadvertently discovered the "mother of all typo's" ... one that gets over 40,000 Overture searches ... and in a niche for an Affiliate product of mine!
And still more good news ... there were only 8,000 Goggle results for this search.
I quickly created a page for this misspelled term and have had a #4 Google ranking with it for about 3 months now. It's become the #2 entry page on this site, behind only the home page.
No, I'm not going to tell you what it is. But I suppose there's nothing stopping the more motivated and persistent of you from coming to my site (which one though?) to discover it.
What I also found is that it wasn't necessary to misspell the term on the actual page created to attract these searchers.
It's high ranking was achieved by simply using the term as part of the page name, in the meta tag title, in the meta tag description and in several alt tags. To most observers, the page looks normal ... and is getting excellent clickthrough results.
So, have at it! Investigate your niche! Chances are you can find some interesting typo's for a nice stream of fr*ee, highly-targeted visitors.