What Is Keyword Stuffing, Actually?
Search engine optimization best practices can get confusing if you don’t understand the terms, or if you do understand and you employ incorrectly. Of course, it can be confusing even if you do everything right.
Let’s take a look at keyword stuffing, for instance. It seems like a pretty straightforward concept and in many ways it is. But a webmaster can get confused trying to figure out just how their content ended up with too many keywords even though they tried their best to avoid that happening.
Unfortunately, the discussion around keyword stuffing is often mixed in with discussion on keyword density. But it doesn’t have to be.
Keyword density if often described as the proper amounts of keyword compared to the amount of text on your web page. If you have 100 words of text and one instance of your keyword then your keyword density is 1%. If you go back and add five more instances of your keyword then your keyword density becomes 5%.
SEO gurus used to teach that a keyword density of 2%-5% was ideal. Some still do. But the problem with that is it means content producers must spent their time counting keywords. But if you look at how web pages are ranked you’ll see that titles and URL carry a lot of weight. There are other factors weighed heavily by search engines as well. But the number of keywords per 100 words of text is a bit of an olf-fashioned way of measuring keyword effectiveness.
Keyword stuffing happens whenever a webmaster takes a page with mediocre ranking and adds keywords to it for the purpose of ranking it higher in the search engines. But such a practice has a relatively low level of return. You are often better off optimizing a new page on your website using a particular keyword phrase and just doing a better job of managing your keywords.
It is often believed that keyword stuffing is black hat or that it is on shaky ethical grounds. Not true. Just because you added keywords to your text doesn’t mean you are stuffing. But it doesn’t mean you’ll be successful either. Keyword stuffing is best described as the process of adding keywords to text (often where unnecessary) for the purpose of getting a page to rank better in the search engines. Webmasters do this because they believe that numbers – that is, keyword density – count.
You should really only go back and add keywords to your web pages to make them more readable and not worry about ranking higher. If you follow Google’s guidelines you shouldn’t have too many problems ranking your web pages.
6 Responses to “What Is Keyword Stuffing, Actually?”
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I try not to focus so much on density in terms of real percentages. I know it is important, however I prefer to write naturally so that my readers get a better experience. If you have something worth saying, then working in your target keywords shouldn’t be a problem.
@Agent SEO – Writing web content naturally for visitors always does much better from a user and search experience.
As a B2B copywriter and marcom pro, keyword density is less important than good content that reads well. Density is something I do at the very end of writing content, as a precaution to make sure I haven’t gone beyond the 3-5% density.
My experience has been that when you focus on writing good content first, your keyword density naturally falls within the acceptable range. I use a twofold process when writing for websites and SEO. I first write the message and make sure that it reads well and resonates with the audience. Then, I look at where the keywords are located instead of density. Here’s a quick checklist:
• Are most of the keywords toward the top of the page?
• Are keywords located in H1-H3 header tags?
• Are keywords in the “alt img” text?
• Have I used keywords in anchor text?
• Have I placed keywords in bulleted lists?
Focusing on these techniques, more than keyword density, offer greater opportunity to boost natural search.
@copywriter4u
@Joan Damico – Thanks so much for providing the checklist! It is right on the money
This information is handy! I think though that there need not be a a conflict between readability and keyword density. Nick, I think that a mediocre ranking page can be converted to a highly ranking page by rejigging the content, without meaninglessly adding keywords. The idea of creating a new page to do so does not always work, particularly if we are doing SEO for a highly competitive industry and the page we are working on is already on page 2. Would appreciate your thoughts?
@Anup Batra – Thanks for reading and your comment!
If a page of a site already has a 2nd page position, then I would recommend to re-optimize naturally for highly relevant keyword phrases. I don’t EVER recommend that pages of content are ever written for search engines but should be written for your visitors to improve the user experience and provide value, etc…