Geneology, the common misspelling of the word
genealogy, can bring very interesting on-line rewards

Geneology? Genealogy? Ask a friend how to spell it and they may just settle for "Family History." And genealogy is even funnier when you see lesser known bargain geneology software. Yes, I've even seen the business world goof it up.

If you've ever stumbled over the word genealogy, it was probably one of these most commonly misspelled ways: genology, geneology, or geneaology.

Don't feel bad if you have. Lots and LOTS of people have and do. And heaven knows I'd be lost without the spell check feature on my computer anyway.

Here's what's so interesting about this geneology/genealogy thing...

There are on-line services that track what key words have been searched on the Internet. This is real data, showing what real people have been searching.

For example, over a two month period, 10,722 searches were done for the key word "genealogy" (by a group of popular search engines--this data is from WordTracker).

Not surprising because genealogy is so popular.

The common misspelled key word "genology" had 302 searches done over that same two month period.

The common misspelled key word "geneaology" had 711 searches done.

Here's the amazing part. The MOST commonly misspelled word, "geneology" was searched for 5988 times! That is over half of the times that the correct spelled word genealogy was.

"So what does this mean to me and my research?" you may ask.

Knowing about how people are looking and posting "geneology" information is a very BIG deal when it comes to finding stuff with the search engines.

You should use a surname (last name) and the key word genealogy (and in this case, geneology).

For example: I went to the Google search engine and did a search using the plus symbols which force the key words to be included...

ragan genealogy

And got over 6,200 results. Of course, I will need to fine-tune this search by adding more key words and doing other things as the e-mail course shows.

But now I want to do a search with the most common misspelling, geneology:

ragan geneology

This time there were over 180 results.

Sure, that's not very many compared to the six thousand plus--but remember, these are results that I would have never seen otherwise.

Here are 180 chances to find valuable information on my surname, Ragan, that I may have missed if I had not known just HOW common that the misspelled word geneology was.

Try this with the surnames that you are researching.