I've been tasked with researching landing pages for client websites to capture search traffic based on misspellings.

I've done some research, and asked my fellow Twitter pals their thoughts, and have come to some conclusions.

First a well-known fact: a huge number of searchers enter the wrong terms, accidentally, when searching online. They may want info on, say, home mortgages, but spell mortgage "mortage" for example.

These searchers want to find my client's site. So what to do?

A for-sure wrong approach: Use a variety of spellings on your landing pages, burying the misspellings on your page so the average reader won't see them. This is bad. I want my clients to know how to spell, and I'm sure they feel the same way.

Another approach: create unique landing pages for misspelled words/search terms. This idea sounds better on the surface. "Hey, I see you were searching for mortgage information. Here's where you probably wanted to go." (and...link).

While I'm still very open to debate, direction and discussion on this topic, I have settled in on an initial verdict (again thanks in part to my Twitter friends).

Capitalizing on misspellings is a good idea for PPC. But as for your own website, I think we may be bordering on gray hat practices. If that's an exaggeration, I'm still thinking this is simply not best practice.

I feel a separate web page, buried in the site's structure to capture misguided, spelling-challenged searches will ultimately detract from a site's credibility. Yes, we are missing traffic if we don't optimize for these searches in some way. But solid, quality content will always pull good traffic without gimmicks or trickery.

I'm not yet willing to say a separate page for wrong words is trickery; I'm maybe 60/40 against adopting this practice.

I hope a conversation ensues following this post. My thoughts at present are - Go for it with PPC, but keep a site's integrity sound with quality content, and let your audience know you can spell while missing traffic from those who can't. Our clients' reputations are at stake here, and I want to be damned sure that if I recommend a strategy for capturing wrong spellings, it's not flying in the face of best practices.