Member Article

Can Poor Proofreading and Jargon Affect your SEO

According to a recent survey by online jobs site Monster.co.uk, a quarter of job seekers said that basic spelling and grammar mistakes were common occurrences in online job advertisements. Many said that they were put off from applying for a job because of these mistakes, highlighting once more the importance of accuracy and attention to detail when creating online content of any kind.

One of the more humorous examples of a typo given to the Monster survey of 2,000 job seekers was an ad looking for someone ‘capable of ruining an office’, but with proofreading that bad they probably don’t need any help doing just that. Putting content online that contains frequent errors is bad for your reputation to say the least, but it can also harm your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.

Check and check again

Once upon a time including common misspellings of keywords was a frequently used SEO practice, aimed at catching the web users who either didn’t know how to spell the word correctly or had made a simple error in haste. However, these days the search engines are much smarter and this approach rarely works. In fact, Google now automatically shows results for the correct spelling when a typo or misspelling is entered.

The fact is that frequent spelling errors on a web page make it look spammy or of poor quality, lowering the chance of it appearing near the top of specific searches, if at all. In a nutshell, there’s no point in doing it deliberately and every reason for thoroughly checking your content for errors before publishing it online.

Jargon a turn off

Another major turn-off revealed by the Monster survey was jargon and ambiguous terms such as ‘leverage’ and ‘self-starter’. It’s not only jobseekers who are put off by jargon, but anyone without specialist knowledge of your particular field. If you invoke language that only a handful of experts know, they may be the only repeat visitors to your website.

Unless there’s a specific reason for it, most people also will not perform a search query for jargon or obscure acronyms, so wherever possible and appropriate use the simplest, most widely understood terms as your keywords. Doing so will not only help your SEO, but should also keep people on your page (and awake) for longer.

Speak to one of our SEO experts today to find out if your web content could be hindering your SEO aspirations.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .