Website Review Service: The Dangers of Keyword Stuffing

Keyword Strategy and Website Review Service

SEO is an important part of online marketing. Building content around the specific keywords that your potential customers are looking for can help drive them to your website and ultimately boost sales.

However, many marketers try to take things a step further. They think, “Since using these keywords this way boosts my site’s visibility, then using them much, much more will make my site super visible, impossible to ignore!”

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Keyword stuffing is considered to be a “black hat” SEO practice. Not only is it morally reprehensible, it doesn’t even work. Let’s take a closer look at the dangers of keyword stuffing.

Types of Keyword Stuffing

There are all different ways of over-saturating your site with important keywords. One of the most notorious is by hiding them. At the bottom of a page, marketers will list the desired keyword over and over again, far off to the side of the main text, in a font that doesn’t show up against the page’s background, or otherwise invisible to the users who click the page — but still able to be picked up by search engines.

Other sites will at least try to work keywords into their content, but they’ll do it in such a way that every other sentence on the page uses the keywords in question (“If you’re looking for discount air conditioning repair, then our discount air conditioning repair is the best discount air conditioning repair out of all the discount air conditioning repair shops out there.”) to the point where the words practically lose all meaning. These tactics used to be a fast track to the number one spot on a search engine. However, Google has found ways of stopping keyword stuffers in their tracks.

Google’s Fickle Algorithms

What makes Google the most popular search engine in the world is its ability to deliver high quality, meaningful search results to their users, rather than spam that’s just trying to get clicks. ?As such, they’ve developed algorithms that recognize keyword stuffing in its various forms, and can differentiate deliberate over-saturation from meaningful and dynamic keyword use in quality content.

It then penalizes keyword stuffers, ranking them lower in the search results for that keyword. In fact, Google’s current search algorithms dictate that using a keyword more than two or three times on a page, four tops, will be recognized as keyword stuffing and count against the website using them.

So what do these algorithms say? Well, for obvious reasons, the public isn’t allowed to know Google’s website-ranking formula. Some basic criteria can be determined through trial and error, but the algorithms are also constantly changing, to combat black hat SEO and improve the way they deliver search results.

Keywords vs. Content

Even if you COULD beat Google’s algorithms, keyword stuffing to get clicks doesn’t even make sense. Once people realize that all your site has is unrelated spam, rather than the content they want, they’ll leave and find someone who DOES have what they’re looking for.

So, what can you do to boost your site’s Google ranking? Just deliver high quality, relevant content that your audience wants to read. Post new content frequently, and focus on the message you want to convey, rather than the keywords you want your audience to find, and you’ll establish yourself as the kind of site people want to visit — which is the type of site Google ranks more highly.

To see how your site can improve in SEO and other areas of digital marketing, use our website review service to take a free Inbound Marketing assessment survey today.