How important is spelling, grammar and punctuation to SEO? You might be tempted to say ‘not terribly.’ A letter in the wrong place, or missing in the right one, is a tiny thing compared to the rest of your search engine optimisation campaign, but it can completely ruin your day.
For example, take a common misadventure in the SERPs. Googling an SEO keyword the other day, my eye caught a misspelled ‘theirs’ in a page’s description. My first thought was, ‘I’m staying as far away from that site as possible.’ The reaction wasn’t entirely down to irritation that a site so sloppy about one of the more basic SEO jobs had made first page in the search engine results pages (although I admit that was part of it). A big part of it was the memory of being stung by sites with similarly low content quality.
I’m not alone in my reaction. Just about everyone’s had a bad experience with a low quality website. Inaccuracies have traditionally been the domain of spam sites. Visible mistakes, therefore, threaten your site’s reputation, and can affect your traffic. Just think about what you would choose, given the choice between an immaculate listing and one that has a few ‘basic mistaeks on’.
The time may well come when txt tlk rulz da net. That time, thank the gods, is not now. Grammar, spelling and punctuation are all fairly basic things in the scheme of things. Don’t let grammar gremlins ruin your site’s chance of success.
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Agree with you completely. Grammar is indeed important and I myself stress the importance of the same among my SEO content writers. And I sincerely hope “da time wen txt rulz da net” never actually comes.