eBay, Misspellings and Google Meta Tags

Misspellings are far more common on the internet than most people think. These result from typographical errors, typing English words how they are pronounced rather than how they are spelled (something that can be compounded by regional and geographic variants). Then there are the differences between different international variations of English). Then there are confusions between homophones (words that sound the same, such as dire and dyer). Some of these errors arise because of mistyping neighbouring keys (where wealth becomes wealyh) others arise because certain sounds in English are similar (b and v for example or even r and l). Other errors occur because of character transposition (such as herd becoming hred) due to miss-typing or characters being dropped (such as search becoming serch) and characters being added (passed becoming passed).

Many of the common misspellings can be derived from the rules of language (which is where being an etymologist helps). Other instances can be derived from (for example) the differences between American and British English. Such lists are freely available (if rather hard to find). Using these it's quite possible to produce an application that derives these errors 'on the fly'. Indeed, it is this application that drives the Celtnet eBay Misspelling Tool. The code also forms the basis for the 'on the fly' calculations performed in the Celtnet MisspellingSearch tool for finding misspellings of words and short phrases. This tool can be used to create misspellings a site's keywords and it outputs a pre-formatted <META> tag to plug straight into your website.

Beyond the basic algorithm (implemented in PERL, with a PHP interface) comes the hard slog. There are a number of misspellings 'in the wild' that essentially defy the standard linguistic laws (in the main these are caused by local variants in spoken English or miss-typings due to right-hand and left-hand dominance). The only way to capture these and to create rules for generating them is to search for them. This necessitates writing a spider that searches for web pages with significant paragraphs written in English displayed (and requires that the pages crawled be 'balanced' in terms of technical pages and pages written in formal and colloquial English). Once the pages are brought back and the HTML tags have been stripped it's a question of passing the pages through a spell-checker (I'm using Aspell which has a PERL interface and handles International English variants) so that the misspellings can be identified. All misspelled words are placed in either one of two files; a file where the misspelling is obvious and a file where there are several possible interpretations for the misspelling. The first of these is amenable to automated analysis whilst the second needs manual intervention. Over many weeks this builds-up a view of the 'real' misspellings on the internet. Some of these misspellings are fed to a database whilst others are built into the Perl script that auto-generates misspellings. (The database I've constructed currently has 1356781 words with almost 2 billion misspellings and it's almost 100Mb in size).

I've now reached the 'diminishing returns' stage for these analyses as it's taking a trawl of almost 30 sites to find a new misspelling (though the other sites are providing useful data on misspelling frequency). As a result it's time to make the various misspelling systems available for others to use. There will probably be updates over the next few weeks, but these will be incremental improvements rather than major revolutions in functionality.

If you want to give these systems a whirl (and they're completely free to use) you can find them here:

Celtnet eBay Misspelling Tool to find misspelled eBay listings for eBay sites in he US, UK, Australia, India and Ireland.
Celtnet MisspellingSearch a generalized misspelling tool to aid with website meta-tag optimization

Microsites and how to Use them

'What is a microsite?' you may well ask... If you've never come across the term before, it's about time that you learnt about them and how you can use them to make money for you.

With the Google AdSense program you can place ads on your own site and gain money from these ads (if you're not already a member then you can use the adsense link on the left-hand panel to join the program). Am microsite (sometimes called a minisite) is a site designed to drive AdSense traffic to a domain of yours. Such a site is usually eight to twenty pages in total and it's specifically written around a single highly-specific topic (for an example see this credit card information site of mine. The site is designed like any big site, with site links and contact pages and a sitemap. There's also real content on each and every page and this is something that the search engines love, proper content. The site is also optimized in that each header and each link contains text that relates to the site's keywords.

As a result of this the site is Search Engine Optimized (or SEO'd to use the current acronym). This improves the site's overall rankings in Google and overall gives you a higher ranking and therefore brings more traffic to your site and the aim of all money-making websites is to attract more traffic. Ultimately, the more people who visit your site the more money you will make...

Depending on the subject a single AdSense minisite will make you between $15 and $60 every month (though it can be more for some sites). For a single site this doesn't really sound like very much, however, as this income can be gained for each and every minisite you have then you can multiply this income stream by twenty, a hundred or even two hundred fold. This is when the monthly income starts to mount up.

I can hear you asking: 'But how can I generate 100 or more sites like this — won't it take forever?' with all the code and the images the first of these websites did take me about four evenings (24 hours) to complete. But I knew that I'd be creating many more of these, so I designed the code to be completely portable and easy to replicate for any website I wished. Indeed, the code is so portable that I'm making it available for FREE to anyone who wants to deploy their own. After that first site it takes me on average two evenings (12 hours) to make a new site live (and this includes all the research and the images!).

Admittedly this isn't my main income stream any more, but the 20-odd microsites that I currently have 'live' still make me a very nice income every month. Moreover this is a very low-maintencance way of generating income. I spot my niche, but a related domain name, create my microsite on my normal hosting plan, point the new domain name at the directory containing the site and the system goes live. To boost initial traffic and get links to the new site I'll write a few articles to be published on various article sites. These articles usually go 'live' in a week and within two weeks I generally see both traffic and income starting to emerge from the microsite.

Even if you can only spend two evenings a week generating your microsite you should have at least 40 such sites up and running within a year which should see you generating at least $400 a month by the end of the year as long as you've chosen your niches well.

One thing to remember is that you're looking for niches with little competition to maximize your traffic and your Google ranking. However, there's no point in making your site too focused otherwise you will have insufficient traffic. The adage here being first do your research. Think of your niche, then think of some keywords related to that niche. Once you have these use Google to perform a search and see how many competitors you have in the niche area. Remember to have a look at some of the top-ranking pages. After all, there may be many thousands of pages in your chosen niche but you may be able to provide better content than any of them and thus you can still come out top of the rankings. It's a question of balance and knowing a little about what you're doing and how you're going to market your site.

If you already have a domain and some server space you will lose noting by giving this a try and it might just make you a tidy extra income!