Yesterday I introduced a new FormatClick.com tool, letter swapper that takes a keyword and cascades a transposition of each letter (except for the first letter in each word). It then finds all the combinations of the various misspelled words that have been created.

For example, entering the phrase ‘search engine’ into the tool would yield:

1. search engine
2. search egnine
3. search enigne
4. search engnie
5. search engien
6. saerch engine
7. saerch egnine
8. saerch enigne etc

Notice that in 2. the ‘g’ and the ‘n’ are swapped. In 3. the ‘g’ and the ‘i’ are swapped and in 4. the ‘n’ and the ‘i.’ These chnages cascade through the word to the end.

The tool tries to mimic people accidentally transposing letters when typing words.

Another problem that keyboard users sometimes have is to accidentally hit a key to the right or left of the key being targeted. The new tool, key word switcher, goes through every keyword and replaces each letter, in turn, with those to the right or left of it. So for example, if you typed ‘blue cat’ into the tool, you would get the following key word combinations:

1. blue cat
2. blue cst
3. blue car
4. blue cay
5. bkue cat
6. bkue cst
7. bkue car

etc

Notice that in 2., the ‘a’ in ‘cat’ has been replaced by the letter to the right of ‘a,’ i.e. ‘s.’ In 3. the ‘t’ has been replaced by the letter to the left of ‘t’ on the Qwerty keyboard, i.e. ‘r’ and in 5. it is replaced with the letter to the right of ‘t’ on the Qwerty keyboard, i.e. ‘y.’

If these new keyword combinations are surrounded by square brackets they could be used in Google Adwords, for example, to target unusual keywords that may be available for a lesser cost per click than their correctly spelled equivalents.

Filed under: Analytics, Internet advertising, Pay-per-click (PPC), adwords by Martyn Whittaker