In the past, webmasters achieve great success in search engine results by employing a strategy called keyword stuffing. While once common practice that helped web pages quickly crack the top of search results pages and achieve great success, Google now heavily penalizes this practice. In this article, we will explain what keyword stuffing is and why continuing to use it can have dangerous consequences if you are hoping to increase organic growth on your website.
Keyword stuffing is an SEO technique that involves loading a webpage with many different keywords in order to manipulate the webpage crawling robots that determine search engine ranking. In many instances, this will be a long list of keywords with no context or relevance to the page’s content or non-visible keywords that are purposely hidden inside meta tags or the website’s code. While once standard practice, this technique is now frowned upon by major search engines and can results in stiff penalties if found.
It is not uncommon to find website designers or “marketing experts” that still use keyword stuffing because it provides quick short-term results. However, as soon as search engines like Google catch wind of these practices a website can be quickly buried in search engine results or, even worse, removed entirely. If this happens, you will constantly be fighting your way back to the top with little to no success. Essentially, your chances of becoming profitable online will seemingly disappear with your once esteemed search ranking position.
So now that you know the dangers of keyword stuffing, what can you do to avoid using it on your website? One of the easiest ways to achieve this is by writing for your website visitors instead of focusing on search engine crawlers. This will not only provide a better user experience, but it will also hit the core metrics that affect your overall SEO score. If you are working with a keyword or keyword phrase and you are afraid you are using it too much, try incorporating synonyms instead.
If you are working with a web designer or marketing firm to write content for your website, ensure they aren’t using keyword stuffing to artificially inflate your search engine rankings. While this can make them look great in the immediate, it will create long-lasting problems in the future. Any businesses that are afraid they may have keyword stuffing in their website content should perform an audit to correct the content as soon as possible.