Different Spellings

If you have any experience with global English for international audiences, you are almost certainly aware of the differences in spelling between American and British English such as favourite vs. favorite, colour vs. color and optimisation vs. optimization, etc. There are also many English words that are commonly misspelled.

Most search engines intuit the common spelling mistakes for their users and provide association (e.g. Did you mean:) to the widely accepted international standard. However, they will provide search results (if any) for the misspelling which means if you have a new product, theme or word that is not recognized as a standard you will need use that spelling. After all, new words only become common words by their popularity over time.

Other than this exception intentionally misspelling words stands in opposition to the definition of "quality content" and should be avoided. For the other cases with words that have multiple spellings or commonly misspelled words that are an important part of your content, i.e. keywords, consider adding a glossary or something similar to include the most common spelling variations on the page. Another way to associate important keywords with different spellings is to abbreviate "also known as" such as optimization (aka optimisation).

Helpful Practices

Do and Don't



		Different Spellings If you have any experience with global English for international audiences, you are almost certainly aware of the differences in spelling between American and British English such as favourite vs. favorite, colour vs. color and optimisation vs. optimization, etc. There are also many English words that are commonly misspelled. Most search engines intuit the common spelling mistakes for their users and provide association (e.g. Did you mean:) to the widely accepted international standard. However, they will provide search results (if any) for the misspelling which means if you have a new product, theme or word that is not recognized as a standard you will need use that spelling. After all, new words only become common words by their popularity over time. Other than this exception intentionally misspelling words stands in opposition to the definition of "quality content" and should be avoided. For the other cases with words that have multiple spellings or commonly misspelled words that are an important part of your content, i.e. keywords, consider adding a glossary or something similar to include the most common spelling variations on the page. Another way to associate important keywords with different spellings is to abbreviate "also known as" such as optimization (aka optimisation).		Helpful Practices Use valid accessible markup Don't try to fool the search engines On-page elements Off-page elements Write quality content Get links Carefully submit Meta tags Friendly URLs Different spellings Descriptive page titles Use valid accessible markup Browser detection Do not use frames Real headings Do and Don't


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