Keyword Stuffing & Keyword Density Do Not Improve Organic Results

Keyword stuffing is one of the biggest errors you can commit when it comes to gaining and keeping an online audience…and in modern times it is also a sin against the almighty search engine.  While having a repetition of keywords is important to improving your search engine rankings and drawing in more viewers, overdoing the density and stuffing in as many keywords as possible will not only alienate your readers, but may even get you banned from the top rankings in search engines!

Keyword Stuffing is so 1990s!

Keyword stuffing is very noticeable, so whatever sounds affected to you in natural human English will likely alert search engines to a problem.  When key phrases are just repeated over and over with little thought, it becomes downright annoying!  For example, if you had a wedding rentals business, a keyword stuffed sentence may sound like this:  “If you are looking for wedding rentals, then we have the best wedding supply rentals you could hope for.  If you need wedding rentals services, you won‘t find cheaper wedding rentals anywhere but here.”

This is awkwardly worded, isn’t it?  If a person said that to you in a “brick and mortar” store you’d think she was crazy!  Keyword stuffing will likewise alert your readers that something is wrong—namely that you’re just using cheap tactics to work the search engines.  All those potential customers will most likely be annoyed and they will quickly hit the back button.  The funny thing is; search engines are also wising up to keyword stuffing.  Now search engines look for pages that overuse one keyword and penalize or even ban sites that keep up this practice.

Don’t Resort to Invisible Keyword Stuffing

There are also some “sneaky” ways to keyword stuff that should also be avoided.  This can be the overuse of words in the META data or “invisible” text in the HTML code behind pages that is filled with keywords and that can only been seen if the text is highlighted.  Your website might get reported as a SPAM site by dissatisfied surfers if you engage in either of these practices.

What you want is a natural flow to the writing, with a few keywords that are spaced out in the information and that won’t stick out as overly obvious.  Your main focus should be on delivering quality material with natural repetition.  This is what will keep your audience interested and hopefully coming back for more.  Repeat traffic often turns into sales, sharing, and linking – all of which may then in turn get you higher rankings in search engines, which is the best and natural way to go about it.

One way to avoid keyword stuffing is to pay attention to what is called keyword density.  In other words, note the number of keywords used in an article compared to how many total words the article contains.  Simply choosing to write human articles and keeping things relative to the website and content is the best approach.

For some, getting targeted keywords to flow naturally in articles and blogs seems too difficult a challenge or too time consuming, which is why SEO firms are often hired for the task.  An SEO firm with quality writers knows how to make articles appealing, relevant, and still contain enough keywords to make search engines take notice.

Pursue organic traffic and leave old “black hat” SEO tricks like keyword stuffing in the past.  If you have personable and informative articles, you will see your traffic and rankings improve!