NEED A GREAT WEB SITE? NEED IT TO BE SEARCH-ENGINE-FRIENDLY? SEO Egghead is a web development firm dedicated to creating custom, search engine optimized web site applications. We specialize in eCommerce and content management web sites that not only render information beautifully to the human, but also satisfy the "third browser" — the search engine. To us, search engines are people too. Click here to talk to us. We'd love to help!

X

As you do your keyword research to find your targets, you may notice that some searchers "misspell" kung fu as "kungfu." Now, typically, search engine marketers would recommend that alternative spellings or misspellings be subtly inserted, or be used consistently on a page-by-page basis. Those solutions never sat well with me. One is definitely unprofessional — no matter how subtle, and the other is just plain annoying.

Let me suggest one more hack — a better one. There's a property called "letter-spacing" in CSS, and it can be used cleverly as follows:

Kung<span style="letter-spacing:-4px;"> </span>fu.

The result looks just like the real thing:
Kung fu. (View the source!)

So, let's call this the "zero-space hack." Deceptive? I don't think a search engine would make a big deal out of a space. Do you?

Looks more like a lousy WYSIWYG editor on a rampage to me.