Keywords Aren’t Turkey: Don’t Stuff!

Writing by Brick Marketing in Keyword Research

When it comes to SEO, there are a few things that you don’t want to be accused of doing. One of these is keyword stuffing, which is the practice of putting lots of (unnecessary) keywords onto your page to try and manipulate your search engine ranking. Trust us; it’s never a good idea to mess with the search engines.

There are a few different keyword stuffing tactics out there. One is to put lots of keywords into your content. For example, a “stuffed” sentence looks like this: “Our dental floss is the best dental floss of any dental floss that ever existed”. Obviously, the targeted keyword here is dental floss. Content like this doesn’t provide a good user experience and it also draws a red flag for the search engines. If the product is every other word or even every third or fourth word it’s annoying to read and can appear spammy and untrustworthy. Meta titles, meta descriptions, and image texts are also frequent victims of keyword stuffing. The keywords should certainly be a part of your content, but in a way that flows naturally and reads well.

A sneaky form of keyword stuffing is to incorporate hidden text into your website. This can be done by using a color that blends in with the background. It’s obviously not noticed by the user, so the content might look legitimate to them, but the search engine robots will notice them. Another form of unethical keyword stuffing is to use keywords (or hide them) that have nothing to do with what you offer but are searched for frequently, like celebrity names.

We know how important keywords are for search results, so it might be tempting to take advantage of this and implement some of these “black hat” tactics. However, the search engines are smart. They will notice if the frequency of words or phrases is unreasonable and you will be severely penalized. Don’t do it!