I often type "toruism" when I mean to type "tourism." It's one of my most frequent typos.

I did it again today. And it got me thinking. So I Googled "toruism" and got some interesting results. Surprisingly, the misspelled "toruism" gets 29,400 hits!

I can't claim to have browsed through them all, but the ones I looked at were mostly the result of typos like the kind I'm guilty of. And the fact that Princeton University was among the sites making this mistake made me feel moderately better about my typing skills.

But other results were more intriguing.

Result #3 was for "Toruism Stock Photography" by David Sanger. Clicking through, I found one image tagged "toruism" by Mr. Sanger. But then I searched for "tourism stock photography" on Google and result #4 is also for Mr. Sanger. Click through this link and you will find 112 photos tagged "tourism"! (A search for the correctly spelled single word "tourism" did not turn up Mr. Sanger's site in the first several pages, as you might expect.)

Clearly Mr. Sanger has created a "landing page" (to use a term of art) targeting the incorrect keyword "toruism" to capture traffic he would have missed otherwise.

So what does all this have to do with home-based travel agents? Simply this: more and more travel agents are selling travel on the Internet and the travel niche in cyberspace is huge. So big, in fact, that calling it a niche is something of a misnomer.

At any rate, if you want to compete for traffic, you're going to have to be creative and play all the angles. And clearly there are people out there using purposely misspelled words to draw visitors to their sites through the search engines.

So here's an exercise for those of you who have web sites. What are your most important keywords and what are their most common misspellings and typographical errors?

Here are some I found for South Carolina:
Common misspellings: southcarolina sout souh soth suth outh so carolin carolia carolna carolina carlina caolina crolina arolina caroli carolins carlina carolinas carilina caralina corolina

It may take some noodling to come up with your own list. Noticing what your clients tend to typo in their emails to you might be a good start.

Once you have a list of likely suspects, consider creating some pages on your web site that target the misspelled key word. For example, if you market tours of Washington, DC, you might want some pages targeted to "Wasington" and "Washinton".

Make sure you have enough inlinks to these pages so the search engines can find them. And make sure you have ways of guiding people from those landing pages to the rest of your site so you can monetize any traffic that develops.

Then sit back and monitor your stats. If you are getting significant traffic to these "bad" pages, you might want to do more of them.

Is anyone out there using this tactic? I'd love to hear your experience.