Don’t use key word stuffing
David Rosam on Aug 01 2007 at 12:58 pm | Filed under: SEO copywriting, Search Engine Optimization
Many of the Web sites we look at suffer from key word stuffing. While I mentioned key word stuffing some time ago on Dangerous Thinking, I’ve never talked in depth about the practice and why it’s undesirable.
Let’s start with why you should avoid it - simply, the search engines will penalise you by pushing your site lower down the natural search results if their algorithms identify the practice.
So what is key word stuffing? It’s using key words inappropriately on a Web page. The most common practice we see is a webmaster filling the keyword meta tag with every key phrase they think might be relevant to the site. Not good. Your key phrase meta tag should represent the page’s actual content (themes, if you like), not what you’d like to people to find your site for. Just put in the key phrases you’re optimizing on.
Stuffing key words into meta tags also means they’re making a second mistake, believing that meta tags still have a crucial role to play in SEO - they don’t, and haven’t done for many years. And, indeed, the way I tend to think of meta tags is that if you get them right, you get a small amount of leverage, but get them wrong and you’re in the poo.
Another common way to come a cropper is to use a piece of standard copy - typically, webmasters tend to put it on every page on the site - with a list of products or services, or geographical locations because they want to attract traffic from searches using these words. In practice, you can get away with this sort of thing, but you’re running I risk if you do. It also lowers the overall user experience for visitors to the site, which may really be the downside.
Google’s Matt Cutts wrote last week that we should Avoid Key Word Stuffing. It’s worth a read, although the example he cites is so extreme, you wouldn’t dream of doing anything like that, would you?
The most useful item in the post is a link to Don’t load your page with irrelevant key words. I’ll quote the advice here because Google is being very clear:
“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. (My italics)
Have a look at your page content and meta tags to make sure you’re not breaking Google’s rules - and if you want a quick way to check that you don’t have too much in your meta tags (and a lot more, besides) use our SpiderTest tool.
