What is keyword stuffing?
Simply put, keyword stuffing is the unhealthy habit of stuffing a web page with random keywords in an attempt to influence search engine rankings. A web page’s visibility could earlier be increased by manipulating Google’s SERP (search engine results page).
Consequently, search engines improved, and began penalising keyword stuffing. Google has the authority to penalise your site by lowering its ranking or even by removing it entirely from its index.
Common keyword stuffing practices to avoid
- Repetition of words or phrases that aren’t necessary and adding irrelevant and out of context language.
- Using keywords that are unrelated to the page’s subject.
- Adding keyword-loaded text all over your page.
- Adding extra keywords in alt, meta, or comment tags.
- Avoid Invisible keyword stuffing. Invisible keyword stuffing refers to the fraudulent practice of hiding the keywords from the eyes of the reader. For example: a web page might keep the colour of a particular text matching to the webpage’s background colour, making it invisible to the reader but visible to search engines.
How to avoid keyword stuffing
1. Make use of your keyword research results
Leveraging the findings of your keyword research is another strategy to prevent stuffing keywords into your content. You may also get lists of pertinent keywords from reputable keyword research tools.
After that, you can look through the listings for relevant SEO keywords. You’ll be able to switch similar keywords across enough to avoid repeating the same ones excessively. Moreover, this will not limit you from getting sufficient SEO benefits.
2. Use long-tailed keywords
Incorporating long-tail variations in your content can really assist search engines in determining that your page revolves around the target keyword. Such keywords give search engines extra context, which strengthens the case for the central focus of a web page.
Long-tail keywords not only provide more context, but they can also inform search engines whether your material has any solutions to inquiries made by readers. If it happens, there’s a possibility that Google’s “People also ask” section will include some of your content.
3. Use LSI-keywords
Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords are those that are inherently associated with a subject. By using them, you’ll inform search engines that the keywords you’re using are associated with the core subject of your content.
This is useful because it might be very challenging to avoid using more keywords while talking about some subjects. However, you can experience fewer problems with keyword stuffing if you provide search engine spiders a hint as to why you are doing this.
LSI keywords will be recognised as semantically linked to a topic by Google and other popular search engines if they are applied correctly. Naturally, it’s still best to make an effort to diversify usage as much as you can.
4. Save target keywords for page elements
Including the target phrase in the appropriate places across page elements, such as the page title, title tag, meta description, beginning and end of the content, a subheading, and an image alt tag, is another helpful strategy for optimising a page for a term. When you optimise page elements, as opposed to filling them with keywords, you inform search engines just what page is about.
Moreover, if the target term appears both in the content’s main body and in every metadata field, this gives search engines a very clear, consistent signal about the content’s main subject. This may lead to the page being ranked in the SERPs for the appropriate target search term.
5. Write longer content
While there is no universal agreement on the “ideal” length, the recommended content length has been continuously growing. Nowadays, longer content is preferable when it comes to generating interaction and content sharing.
It’s a clever method to minimize keyword stuffing problems. It’s much simpler to carefully spread out keywords and reduce the need to repeat your core SEO keywords when content is lengthier and more in-depth.
Summary
The smartest strategy to avoid keyword stuffing is to write to your readers. We may lose sight of the fact that our readers are the ones that contribute while we are focused on achieving the highest rank in organic search. Give your readers a fantastic experience while having fun writing a blog post without stuffing it with keywords.
Keyword-optimised pages provide search engines clarity regarding the page’s content and what search phrase it should display in search of. In contrast to keyword-stuffed webpages that just repeat a random keyword over and over again with the ultimate objective of deceiving and manipulating ranking systems. This leads to more visitors returning to your webpage and higher traffic as well as ranking.
