What Is Keyword Stuffing and Why You Should Avoid It
In need of getting a better ranking position, website owners would do many things. Various tactics can help a site become more prominent and thus more visible to users, meaning potential customers. Acceptable tactics, however, don’t bring such a huge success and are often not fast enough. On the other hand, the so-called black hat tactics bring quicker results. The problem is that using them regularly and without control can be pretty risky. One such tactic is keyword stuffing, so let’s see what keyword stuffing is and why you should avoid it.
The keyword strategy
Nowadays, more and more products and services are offered online. The internet has become one big market where people get information, buy and sell almost everything. They type what they need, and the results simply come out. And that’s how we come to the term keywords. They should reflect the words and phrases customers use when they search for particular services or products via search engines. And it’s exactly this keyword tactic that many website owners use when optimizing their SEO elements.
However, filling your content with as many keywords as possible is not the right thing you should do. What’s more, it can be pretty harmful to both your website and your ranking.
Make sure your content is catchy for your customers.
What keyword stuffing is and why you should avoid it
When content or a webpage is filled with the same keyword or phrase that repeats repeatedly, we talk about keyword stuffing. While this strategy is mainly employed for gaining a higher ranking position on the search engines, in many cases, it can have a counter effect. Content with too many repetitive keywords usually seems unattractive to visitors. They quickly lose interest in it, even if it offers the desired information. What’s more, this might cause them to leave the website immediately, and they would probably never return to it.
Thus, for example, if you use the keyword the best sports cars three or four times within a single paragraph, that would pretty much exceed the suggested keyword density.
Types of keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing comes in two main types:
- Visible– when there’s an obvious repetition of words or the usage of phrases entirely irrelevant to the topic. They’re called visible since everyone who visits the site is able to notice them.
- Invisible– overusing the keyword in the comments, alt tags, or meta descriptions, or hiding the text from the readers, which you gain by using the same color for both your background and your text. These, on the other hand, are created only to manipulate and trick the search engine crawlers. The readers can’t see them, but crawlers still can.
Throughout the years, both of these were effectively used by the website owners, and they really helped them reach their goals.
How harmful can it be?
Because the impression a text leaves on the readers is the only thing that can keep them, once your content becomes repetitive, it becomes useless as well. At that point, it’s obvious that your content serves not to satisfy your potential customers’ needs but only those of search engines.
Your focus moves from your readers to your ranking, and this is the point where you start losing your customers. Their negative experience with your site will make them go somewhere else.
There are so many elements you need to respect when making high-quality content.
Once again, we come to the question of trust. It is equally important to convince both your potential customers and search engines of the quality of what you have to offer. However, once when people start associating your brand with poorly written content, your reputation is permanently damaged. The thing is that only trustworthy businesses really survive on the market.
Finally, you need to know that this keyword stuffing strategy is just an old spam technique. However, Google and other search engines became smarter as time went by. Nowadays, they are not only able to spot such practice right away, but they also enforce penalties. Simply said, search engines don’t approve of these actions anymore. The practice of keyword stuffing has become one of the top SEO mistakes every website owner should avoid whenever possible.
What you can do to make the best use of your keyword
Now that you know what keyword stuffing is and why you shouldn’t use it, it’s time to learn how to avoid it.
Take care of your SEO.
- The first step is optimization. You should use your keywords in the right places. The primary focus should be on the quality of the content, and then you can work on properly using keywords within the context. Use them only where you see it is natural.
- Your target word or phrase should be relevant to the topic.
- Use synonyms. This technique can solve a great part of the problem. If you use the appropriate synonyms instead of mere repetition of the keywords, you can avoid keyword stuffing. Still, at this point, you should be careful. Always use clear, not confusing words. Unfamiliar vocabulary can also turn people away.
- Create longer content. For content to be relevant and thoroughly informative, it is better to be longer. That ensures an in-depth development of a topic. What’s more, it helps you spread out the keywords throughout the content without stuffing them. Although there is no perfect number of words per text, most experts would agree that every content longer than 300 words is acceptable.
- The optimal keyword density should be 2%.
- Add keywords to the other page elements as well. That would include the title, a subheading, the beginning and end of the text, an alt tag, and a meta description.
So, if you think you are doing your best but your website still doesn’t get better results, check your keywords. Maybe this story about keyword stuffing and why you should avoid it is exactly what you need.
