Monday, November 7, 2016

Knowing the Difference Between Keyword Stuffing and Keyword Optimization

What people type on search engines like Google are keywords. These help the users find the websites that would match their queries, and if yours don’t land on the first 4 or 5 pages, you’re unfortunately not going to get any website visits.


But it’s one thing to responsibly optimize keywords and another to do the dreaded technique of keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is the act of using keywords repetitively on the content or tags of a single webpage in order to achieve a high ranking in search engines. This has been observed to be a search engine optimization (SEO) technique much frowned upon, and thus dubbed as “unethical.”

This leads to the website becoming overly optimized, and for what purpose? To cheat its way to the top ranks. It’s nothing but a desperate move to gain traffic, but a highly ineffective one at that.

Imagine you stumbling upon a webpage that reads:

“This healthy diet delivery service is the answer to all your dieting problems. Healthy diet delivery service is the future because it’s not just any food delivery service; it’s a healthy diet delivery service. E-mail us now to avail of our healthy diet delivery service and get 20% off your first healthy diet delivery service purchase!”

It’s unlikely that you would avail of this product / service, let alone stay on that website for an extended amount of time.

Search engines can already detect keyword stuffing, and have the power to ban a website either temporarily or permanently.  So why go through all that trouble that won’t bring fruit?

Instead, focus your effort on responsible keyword optimization, that is, knowing the right keywords for your company. Careful research should be made in discovering what Internet users search for that’s relevant to your business, and the existing competition for those keywords.

Focus on less competitive and highly specific phrases. One or two words won’t be enough to get the ball rolling. There are tools online you can use to know what phrases you can utilize for your webpages such as Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner!

Keywords are essential for successful SEO, and writing great content will reap great rewards.