Don’t waste time! Garb the oppurtunity now!
Suppose the above-given statements are given as the heading of a website. How would you feel if you come across such a web page? If I were in your place, my thoughts would be “well, if they can’t get their heading right, probably they are not right in their head too.” This is the same reaction that you’ll get if caught with a spelling or grammar error in your website. Much as you think that a small spelling error is not going to make a big difference, the truth is it does! And the cost you’d be paying is loss of more visitors and thereby potential customers.
From the point of SEO error-free content is more accessible and readable for the human visitors and crawlable and indexable for the search engines. As the websites are browsed very fast by the users it is all the more important to create a page that has good content. Moreover it adds to the credibility of the website. Most of the users would span a website for about 3–5 seconds before deciding on whether to read further or not. You need to impress the readers in this minute span of time. So if they find a spelling error in such a brief glimpse, you can’t really blame them for clicking the back button.
A web page that has spelling errors indicates many things about its creators:
- They don’t really care about the content they have provided.
- They are too lazy to edit their own work.
- They lack education to provide content that is error free.
Unfortunately, ensuring that the content provided is free of errors in spelling, grammar, syntax and usage is the very thing that most web masters fail to do. Which in turn can bring about a loss of billions. In fact, a recent survey conducted by Royal Mail indicated that more than 70% of the customers would hesitate to do business with people who have poor communication skills. And communication skills not only mean good verbal skills but also written skills.
A good way to tackle this problem is to install spell checking softwares that would check the spellings used and indicate if they are spelt wrongly. However, many web masters think that after creating the content, all they need to do is just to run a spell check. In reality that is not at all true. Because spell check is just the first step in editing content. It just recognises a word that is spelt wrong to create a non-existing word. So when there are issues of words like their vs. there and you’re vs. your, spell check fails to identify that the word has been misspelt as another word. Needless to say, the ultimate result is a spelling mistake. Similarly when words are spelt in one place as that commonly used in another place. The common occurrence of this is the UK vs. US spelling clash. Most writers forget to check whether the spellings used are the ones used in the country they are writing for.
Here are a few reasons you need to go through your content even after running a spell check:
- They identify only non-existing words.
- They don’t identify a word that is spelled to mean another word. For example, their vs. there.
- They don’t identify many errors in grammar and syntax.
- They don’t pick up the wrong choice of words. For example, using “a catastrophe” where “an accident” would’ve been sufficient.
- They don’t see whether something could be said in a better or euphemistic way.
Even though catchy images, colours and animations catch the readers’ attention very easily, what makes that attention sustain is good, error free content. It makes the website look professional, not just from the users’ point of view but also from that of the search engines’. If you check the top five or six websites in Google’s search result pages you can see that these websites have few or no errors in the content. Provide simple and at the same time error-free text. After all, “you never get a second chance to make the first impression”.
