SEO has become an important part of any digital marketing strategy. Basically, search engine optimisation (SEO) means optimising the use of certain relevant keywords. But how do you know when your keywords or phrases are being overused? When is the use of keywords too much and considered unethical practice in digital marketing?
Keyword stuffing, also known as over-optimising, can actually have the opposite effect that was intended by your SEO efforts. Google actually has parameters in place to check for keyword stuffing on websites and blogs. So, at what point will the use of your keywords be considered unethical by the search engines?
To avoid the risk of falling into the category of being a keyword stuffed website, it’s advisable to complete a digital market course which will enable you to effectively incorporate keywords and phrases correctly in your site or blog.
The point of keywords
If you’re a regular blogger, or involved in any form of digital marketing, you’ll know the importance of selecting just the right keywords for your site or blog. But it’s now become just as important to know how to keep tabs on just how many of those keywords you use.
Years ago, the way to get your site or blog ranked was to deliberately overuse selected keywords. This approach most definitely doesn’t work any longer. Search engines, such as Google, will penalise your site for over-optimising (keyword stuffing) your site or blog.
All this being said, keywords do still pay a vital role in your search engine optimisation, if done correctly. Keywords attract visitors to your site or blog and are key to your SEO campaign. So, the lesson here is finding keywords that work well for your site or blog and being mindful not to overuse them. The modern search engine bots are well programmed and there’s no way of getting around your site or blog being penalised if they spot keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing examples
In order to avoid keyword stuffing it’s good to know where using it is frowned upon by the search engines.
Here are a few keyword stuffing examples:
- Using keywords under a title;
- If keywords are repeated in the meta tag or description;
- Using keywords more than once in the URL;
- Hiding keywords behind images;
- Making keywords the same as the background colour;
- Using keywords too many times in sub-titles, external and internal links.
The downfalls of keyword stuffing
With online digital marketing trends constantly changing it’s important to fully understand the downfalls of keyword stuffing so as to not adversely affect your SEO.
An awful lot of planning, research and hard work goes into creating a great website or blog, so the last thing a marketer wants is their work to be penalised by the search engines for keyword stuffing. It’s also important to know that receiving a penalty can set your SEO back and could even result in a loss of revenue.
As you’ve already most probably realised, there are a lot of disadvantages of keyword stuffing and here are just a few:
- Keyword stuffing can hurt your brand reputation;
- Your conversion rate will be lowered as people will end up leaving your site or blog when they realise it’s been keyword stuffed;
- Increased bounce rate;
- Search engine penalties;
- Makes for a bad user experience.
How to avoid keyword stuffing
Now that you understand the downfalls of keyword stuffing, you’ll need to know how to avoid it. We now understand that driving traffic to your site via keyword stuffing will not benefit your SEO, but it can be fixed and avoided.
The good news is that most search engines, especially Google, handles synonyms well, so you can change things up by using other words with the same meaning in your content. Remember to spread your words out and use alternatives.
Because Google uses algorithms to determine the number of times keywords appear in content, it’s very effective to measure your keyword density and there are a number of online tools that help you do this.
Taking all of the above tips on how to avoid keyword stuffing into account is a good way to avoid making this mistake and remember it can easily be achieved by writing top quality content