Loading ...There is a saying that goes to the tune of, ‘you can never get too much of a good thing’. Unfortunately, for all website owners, that statement does not hold true as far as SEO is concerned. When you are optimizing your website, you may think that going overboard with a particular optimization tactic can’t do much harm. However, it can when you are keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is one of the most common optimization mistakes that any website can make. That is why you have to be extra vigilant to make sure that your website does not fall prey to that mistake. Here’s how it all works.
The art of stuffing
Now, you may ask one very pertinent question. When do you cross the line from enough to too much? Well, that is a fine line and you will need to learn a bit about keyword stuffing in order to know exactly where that line lies. There is a general consensus that roughly 3 percent of your actual content should be keywords.
Many website owners ignore this and try to stuff keywords into every inch of the content. This is when you are going way overboard and need to stop to rethink your strategy. The search engines pick keyword stuffing up quickly and you will lose favour with them for doing that. There are other, tactical ways of getting the full use of your chosen keywords.
Maximizing usage
One thing that you need to remember when you are trying to optimize your website as far as keyword usage is concerned, the crawlers and engines see all text. That means that they see your Meta tags, your anchor text, your domain name, your page headings and much more. If it is text, they see it. This is where you strike gold in order to maximize your keyword usage.
You can place keywords in all of those things, taking the load off your copy to uphold a strong keyword presence. Speak to your optimizer or throw some questions out on a SEO forum. Find out all the ‘hidden’ spaces that you can stick keywords into in order to give you the number of keywords you need, without stuffing.
Write for the people
Keyword stuffing has a second negative effect on your overall SEO efforts. Firstly, the engines don’t take kindly to the practice of stuffing. Secondly, they consider keyword stuffing to be black hat SEO. Thirdly, your human visitors will not appreciate your keyword stuffing either. When you stuff keywords into a copy until it is just about only keywords and nothing else, it is not informative, it is not interesting and it certainly is not easy to read.
This puts visitors off your content and off your website faster than an eviction notice. Once your visitors start realizing what you have done, your web traffic will diminish and your web presence will too. This leads to a huge loss in SEO and it leads to you losing any favourable rank you might have had in the SERP. This in turn leads to even less web traffic and so on and so forth. It is a self perpetuation cycle of becoming less and less popular.
Related posts:
- SEO and Keyword Stuffing
- Implications of hidden text in SEO
- SEO – getting over the hurdles
- Content misconceptions that kill your ranking
- The value of subtlety
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