Expression Engine Has a Space Here

Posted on 8 March 2010 | by Ryan Battles

A coworker of mine asked me today why "ExpressionEngine" is spelled with two words all over my site ("Expression Engine"). While many people incorrectly assume that ExpressionEngine is two words, I have actually intentionally misspelled it, and for a very specific reason.

First of all, I will preface this by stating what ExpressionEngine is. It is a content management system that is adored by developers around the world for its ease of use, flexibility, and power. It is a great system, and any Google search for a review of EE will prove its popularity. My web studio uses this CMS on almost every site that we build, and have decided to make it the focus of our marketing efforts.

So why would I intentionally misspell the word? A little SEO research is behind the answer here. First, I wanted to know how many search results would show up if I were to search for "ExpressionEngine" vs. "Expression Engine".

If I search for "ExpressionEngine", there are over 1 million results on Google:

If I search for "Expression Engine", there are less than one third of that number:

In short, there is less competition in the search results if I want to optimize my site to be found under "Expression Engine".

This is not a very important piece of data unless there are actually people searching for "Expression Engine" instead of "ExpressionEngine". The next step then is to determine just how many people are searching for these terms using Google's Keywords Tool.

Going off of the global monthly search volume for both terms, it appears that "Expression Engine" is searched for 90,500 times, as opposed to 74,000 searches for "ExpressionEngine". At almost a 20% difference between the two, the spread is not alarming. There is also the possibility that people who search for "Expression Engine" may be looking for something else altogether. Those two terms are fairly commonly used in the English language (although not often together outside of this context). I decided a better statistic would be derived from searching for the terms with the addition of the terms "Developer" and "Development". It was then that I found a telling piece of data:

While there is not enough data to return the local search results, the global search volume is up to 286% greater for the keyword "Expression Engine" separated by a space. Bottom line, more people out there are searching for "Expression Engine" developers than "ExpressionEngine" developers, and there is less competition for this set of keywords to boot.

It is with this data that I can confidently misspell the word on my website. While I love the ExpressionEngine community and the product itself, the bottom line is that I need to help clients who are searching for a solution before working as a brand loyalist for EllisLab, the creators of ExpressionEngine.

Tags: expressionengine, web design and development, seo, web design & development,

Comments (12)

Andy Johnson March 08, 2010		I think you make a good point here Ryan. It's been my observation that EE developers themselves are the ones that make such a big deal about the spelling of ExpressionEngine (I'm guilty of this), and not your typical client. So if adding the extra space is working for you, and the right clients are finding you, then all the more power to you!
Ryan Battles March 08, 2010		Thanks Andy. I'm not to the first page for my keywords yet, but I just went through a major design overhaul recently, and hope that my rankings will rise in the weeks to come. I think your comment is true in many other situations as well. We often do things to benefit or impress our own communities, rather than focusing on what the client actually cares about. That is why tools such as those that Google provides help me to see things more objectively.
John Green March 08, 2010		When I first started looking at EE, a search for "expression engine" would give me lots of links to information about the parsing of regular expressions using the built-in expression engines in Perl, Ruby, etc. But a search on "ExpressionEngine" would find more links on the CMS. Times have certainly changed, as I'm too lazy to even click through the Google results on "expression engine" now to find how many pages deep I'd have to go to find links about regular expression programming.
Angie March 08, 2010		This is great info, and you can't argue much with numbers. :) That said, my studio site ranks almost the same for a similar string (with a locality modifier) regardless of a space in ExpresisonEngine or not. That's not to discredit your point here at all as I think it's a wholly valid one. But, I'd be curious to see what your results / ranking will be in say a month or three. Personally, I think Google knows there can be a difference, but that's not always the case. In any case, great write up! I think I enjoyed reading about the process more than the results. :)
Ryan Battles March 08, 2010		Thanks again for the comments. I do notice that Google does bring up a lot of "ExpressionEngine" results when searching for "Expression Engine". The interesting thing about that is that "ExpressionEngine" is highlighted, meaning that they equate the two as pretty much the same thing (the same way they do with plural and singular versions of words). Because of this, I might as well just go ahead and keep the space out of the word. That being said, I also noticed that the results are different with and without the space, so Google doesn't totally see them as identical.
Ryan Battles March 08, 2010		Actually, now that I've just studied the results pages for the words with and without a space, the results are very similar, just in a slightly different order. Some sites rank a few higher or lower depending on the spelling of the word. I think I'll try this setup for a couple of months to see if it makes any difference, and note where my rankings lie. I will then switch back to the correct spelling (perhaps the world will catch on by then) so I don't continue to annoy those in the know.
Angie March 08, 2010		Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it annoying anyone. :o) It annoys me enough on my own stuff/site that I have it spelled correctly, but fully acknowledge that a lot of people misspell it. For that, I'm glad that the results for both versions are similar. Hope it works out well for you though! Do post a follow-up! :)
Erik Reagan March 18, 2010		I was just micro complaining about this earlier today. I got so caught up in the "right way" to spell/type EE that I hadn't slowed down enough to consider the reason and benefit to adding the space. I'll likely be playing with variations of the two in different places on my pages in the coming weeks & months. Thanks for the post Ryan :)
Erik Reagan March 18, 2010		I forgot to drop my links from the micro complaint. I was quickly well-informed by Mike Boyink and Marcus Neto http://twitter.com/ErikReagan/status/10686441600 and then http://twitter.com/ErikReagan/status/10687595752 followed by http://twitter.com/ErikReagan/status/10688071436 Okay, I'm done explaining myself :)
Ryan Battles March 19, 2010		I suppose this is as good enough of a place to leave some benchmarks. What I did was count what percentage of my top ten Google organic search referrals were from ExpressionEngine with and without a space. November: 0% EE \| 50% E E December: 20% EE \| 50% E E January: 20% EE \| 30% E E February (site redesign): 0% EE \| 10% E E March: 20% EE \| 20% E E Basically, the results are inconclusive, although it does certainly appear that redesigning my site and moving content structure around has had a negative effect on my SEO for ExpressionEngine! I'll post a follow-up blog in the months to come after Google forgives my housecleaning.
Ian Pitts April 21, 2010		Interesting. You know what might give you the best of both worlds? Your friendly little SPAN element. Put either "engine" or "expression" within a SPAN element and then via CSS remove the space (negative left margin) that exists in your markup. This way, you have the best of both worlds. You'd no longer have to respond to snarky commenters like me who whine about misspelling ExpressionEngine and you also get your SEO goodness. Thoughts?
Disk Recovery May 14, 2010		I will then switch back to the correct spelling so I don't continue to annoy those in the know.