Anyone who knows me well is probably aware that I have a strong dislike for badly written English and have little or no time for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.
If you are selling a product or service then you need to convince people that you are a professional and take pride in the presentation of the product. The slicker and more professional the package the more likely people are to feel confident in it.
These would seem to be universally accepted truths.
So would you really want to spend thousands with a company that cannot even spell their main service?
While browsing the web over the weekend I came across a couple of sites that were shockingly bad.
If you sell "search engine optimisation" the least you could do is check the spelling of the word "optimisation". If you aren't sure there is this wonderful invention called a dictionary.
Of course not everybody speaks English as their mother tongue, so you have to make allowances in some cases.
But how does this affect your online marketing with search engines?
I mentioned a study previously that demonstrated the value of "good English".
Of course that study did not take into account the value of typos. You've seen the Google spelling correction tool?
Well, have you seen its data?
Quite scary! So maybe there is a place, albeit a rather strange one, for bad language online.
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About this Entry
This page contains a single entry by Michele Neylon published on January 30, 2006 12:45 AM.
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You're feedburner RSS link doesn't work - it throws up an error msg.
"Optimisation" can be spelled more than one way, as we in the U.S. can attest.
I think what you're running with this observation is what we've seen again and again with search, tags, domain names, and so on -- that people will call things how they want to call them (and spell them the way they want to spell them), no matter how many dictionaries and grammars you point them to.
Furthermore, the successful company or marketer will take care to try to understand the vocabulary and language that is being used by customers, or they might end up being right, but being invisible.
Antony - Yes - but you can't spell it "optmistaion" :)