Why over saturation is a danger to your business
Recently I have been helping a few of my clients update their website niche pages. I enjoy creating informational content that is easy to read and location specific but was reminded that sometimes good content is not everything. An example of this is I was asked to put 4 keywords in a 300 word document at least 3 times each. Not hard right? Well make sure they have the name of the company as well as the location of the company attached to each keyword and suddenly your page starts to sound a little strange. I was not writing for the reader anymore I was writing for the computer. What is more important? I am not sure, but I decided to do some research on keyword stuffing to educate myself on finding that true balance of great content and SEO keyword optimization. What I found is keyword stuffing was once standard industry practice is now considered a strictly black-hat tactic. What is keyword stuffing?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) keywords are the key phrases and words featured in your web-based content that drive search engines to direct people to your site. Keywords should be relevant to your audience and are most effective when placed in the title, headlines, and URL. Keyword stuffing is the practice of manipulating search engine results pages (SERP) by cluttering keywords onto a page regardless of the quality of content. As you can guess, this often leads to a less than desirable user experience.
The dangers of over-optimizing
Search engines are wising up to the keyword stuffing trick. Google has taken to penalizing offenders by demoting their rankings and even removing some altogether. Matt Cutts of Google announced at the 2012 SXSW that the search engine is working on an over-optimization penalty:
“We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.”
Tips for inserting keywords safely
Keyword stuffing is only a short term solution to driving up the usage on your site, and as stated above, can be risky business. Check out these tips for inserting keywords safely.
- Is there are magic number for keyword density? Some say yes, others no. 2-5% is considered a safe bet.
- Use long-tail keywords to spice up your content.
- Long tail keywords are longer, more specific keywords
- Try implementing synonyms
- Google will now bold synonyms in search results – by helping Google stay relevant, sites implementing synonyms are often rewarded
To sum it up I think Agency Revolutions says it nicely, “it’s best to focus on providing quality content to readers, instead of optimizing website text to a specific keyword density”.
What do you think – should we stuff the content with as many keywords as possible or just stick with the old saying, Content is King?
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