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Are You Guilty Of Keyword Stuffing?

By Elmar Sandyck

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 06Sep2010 Word count: 611 Viewed: 378 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Every site seeks to rank high in the internet's many search engines' results. One way to achieve this is by optimizing one's site with the use of keywords throughout one's website content. Search engines will love your site if it has both great content and relevant keywords, but not when you commit keyword stuffing just to rank high in search engine results.

What is this practice and why is it a major SEO blunder?

Let's say you've already built your website, researched the keywords to use for your SEO purposes, and you have written what you think is great, engaging content.

Keyword stuffing happens when you use keywords, linking structures, tags and other means of optimization on your site that has no relevance to the website's content or purpose. Maybe you got a little excited and packed your content with too many keywords, or maybe you're just being careless, putting in keywords that aren't even relevant to your site.

What bad does this do and how can you prevent it?

Keyword stuffing creates link spam.

Of course, you want your site to be accessible to everyone. Who doesn't?

Search engine results instantly give your site a boost especially when you are listed on the first page results. However, your site may be popping all over the place without any relevance to the keywords you stuffed in your content, and this is definitely a waste of your time. Why? Your site might be flagged as a spam site. Keyword stuffing offenses are monitored by the search engines, and if you are guilty of this, it can result to a temporary or permanent exclusion of your site from its results!

Solution: Utilize other venues of promotion.

If your main concern is to drive traffic to your site, avoid keyword stuffing. There are many ways to promote and create traffic. You are not limited to putting in as many keywords and links as you can.

Explore other venues.

You can network with your target market or other similar businesses on social networks by sharing links to your posts, bookmark your content on social bookmarking sites, participate in professional forums or you can utilize Twitter, as tweets are now also searchable in search engines.

Keyword stuffing results to content duplication.

Before we get into this, let's talk about keyword density. This is a measure of the times your keyword appears on a page expressed as a percentage of the total word count of that page. If, for example, your page has 100 words, and your keyword appears 5 times, its density is 5%. Generally, most experts claim that a keyword density from 1% to 3% is best.

Given that you can place keywords through various ways into your site, repeating the words over and over again makes your content redundant. Keyword stuffing results in irrelevant and manipulated search results, and it can turn your readers off! (Just imagine your site sounding like one big giant ad of the same thing, over and over again.)

Solution: Strategically place keywords in your posts, and use them sparingly.

Consider replacing some of the occurrences of the keyword with synonyms. Remember, readers want to get search engine results that are relevant to their query, not just get what's on top of the search engine list. In fact, when you choose your keywords wisely and place them strategically and sparingly in your site, you can create a wave of "good karma". The next time you write, keep this in mind: If readers like your site and you provide valuable content, they will recommend it to others, who will recommend it to their friends, and so on.

No amount of keyword stuffing can compete with that.

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