i was playing with my site meter this morning. as i was browsing through the referring pages, i noticed that several viewers were referred to my site by a search engine after searching for "uday qusay hussain." when i originally wrote the 7/23/03 entry i misspelled "hussein" as "hussain." i tend to do that (i don't just mean spelling mistakes in general, which i also have a chronic problem with. i also have a specific problem with the name hussein in all its spelling variations since i know two people with that last name, each spelling it slightly differently than the former iraqi leader. arabic transliteration is a messy thing) a day or two later, i glanced at my blog, noticed the mistake, and corrected it. even though corrected, the old version lives on in the google database (i'm not sure why that is, but i've noticed that phenonmenon previously) and so even today, i keep getting referrals thanks to my hussain spelling in a prior version of this blog
anyway, it occurred to me that i actually gained viewers by spelling hussein wrong. i'm not sure if more viewers is something i actively want to try to attract, but if it, is maybe using common misspellings is the way to go. after all, there are probably millions of sites that wrote about uday and qusay hussein, among such a large group i have no chance of standing out. but among the "hussain" references, i am one of the proud few. the trick is coming up with a misspelling that is both uncommon enough that i end up being one of the few sites that uses it, yet common enough so that lots of search engine users make they error when typing their search fields.
meanwhile, someone else using a german search engine found my site while searching for "gay arabic." i'm guessing this wasn't what he (she?) was looking for.
p.s. any errors in this post are intentional
