I’ve written a whole series of articles on common grammar and word choice mistakes that I see in printed marketing materials, and now the search engines have wised up to poor writing on the Internet as well. More than ever, good grammar and punctuation and choosing the right word among similar sounding words is becoming vital to protecting and increasing your online income.

The search engines have implemented a strategy called LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), which uses more natural language processing to determine what a web page (or article) is about. So the bots that search your web page or online article look for related words, and so if you write “there” when you mean “their,” the bot may downgrade your page in the rankings.

In the same way, a run-on sentence may be considered as one of those black hat keyword stuffing techniques. By using punctuation such as commas, colons and semicolons properly, you will be able to match your sentence construction to ideal of what the bot is looking for, because the bot understands the rules of grammar and punctuation.

I, for one, welcome this new development. The Internet is already full of garbage content, and the engineers at the search engine companies have finally figured out what people want: content-rich pages that are written well, with proper grammar and spelling so that the reader doesn’t have to spend time deciphering the meaning of the writer. So proofread your older work for common errors in English, and take advantage of the new rules to refresh your knowledge and increase your human capital, as well as your financial capital!