Keywords - Are You Stuffing ?

Keyword stuffing and how to avoid it.

What exactly is keyword stuffing?

Simply answered it's using your keywords too often on your web page. Effectively "stuffing" the keyword in as often as you can in the hope that your page will rank high with the search engines.

Like most SEO bad habits, it's a trick that did work once and so people are still trying it. It's what is called an SEO Black Hat technique, however a lot of people end up stuffing quite innocently. It's so easy to do. Your mind is so fixed on your keyword as you write your webpage that subconsciously you keep using it.

The search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) all like a certain level of keyword density but there is a point at which a page moves from being "rich" in a keyword to being "stuffed" with it.

Of course the search engines all keep this threshold to themselves. If we all knew at what point a keyword is overused then we would all write our pages such that it was used to the maximum and no more.

So the trick is to get the balance just right.

However if the search engines aren't going to tell us what that balance is then how do we know where to draw the line.

Learn from the Keywords Winners

Whilst we can't get a straight answer out of the search engines, we can check the websites that they rank high and get an idea as too how often they are using keywords.

Simply type in your keyword and then take a look at the top four or five sites. See how often they use the keyword phrase and also pay attention to where they are using it.

Generally, most good sites will have the keywords mentioned once in the title tag, once in the description meta tag, once in one of the heading tags and then liberally sprinkled through the main copy of the website.

This "liberal sprinkling" is hard to judge as it really depends on how much other text there is on the page. Some experts quote that a keyword can be used safely every 400 to 500 words. That seems reasonable from some of the sites I've seen. However go check some pages for yourself. The search engines continually update the algorithms so any hard rule I write here could be out of date before the ink dries on the screen!