Keyword stuffing is crap - why you should avoid keyword stuffing for SEO
- SEO |
I posted last week about a client that wanted me to basically keyword stuff for a blog I was writing for him.
I fought his brief after discussion about this strategy with the forum but I ended up doing the project for him because he was very clear that he wanted to test out this strategy and he didnt really care what the mainstream did, he wanted to be a little unique.
Since then, I have been looking at why it is a crap idea to keyword stuff.
Heres what I have put together for the people out there who want reasons why not to keyword stuff:
Next time someone asks you to stuff as many keywords as you can in content Id be inclined to show them a thing or to about why not to do down this path, whether they listen or not is their call but I know for one thing the whole idea of keyword stuffing is just not worth it.
I fought his brief after discussion about this strategy with the forum but I ended up doing the project for him because he was very clear that he wanted to test out this strategy and he didnt really care what the mainstream did, he wanted to be a little unique.
Since then, I have been looking at why it is a crap idea to keyword stuff.
Heres what I have put together for the people out there who want reasons why not to keyword stuff:
- You could be penalised in search engines - why would you even do something that runs a risk of being bumped down by Google? The practice is banned on Google and can incur some rather harsh penalties so best to avoid it all together.
- It just looks weird - this isnt really a reason but if you try and stuff 50 keywords in 1 blog it does turn out to be a red hot mess no matter how great a writer you are.
- Your readers will pick up on unnatural use of keywords and the readability will be affected - we all can tell when a blog has been stuffed with keywords, the flow is poor, there are areas that just dont make sense and the overall purpose of an informative blog is lost due to the fact that the writer is so focused on getting record numbers of keywords implanted in-between a few joining words.
- Hiding keywords is really, really bad practice - it may sound sneaky but plenty of keyword stuffing is done by hiding keywords in the background and matching the font colour - all really bad practice.
- Youll hurt your credibility - when youre working so hard to drive engagement and increase your following why would you even risk this by keyword stuffing? Unique and engaging content will win hands down over-stuffed content that makes little to no sense.
- Your meta descriptions wont make sense - stuffing content will not only provide poor user experience but it is detrimental to the flow of your website content including title tags and meta descriptions. Furthermore, if you stuff keywords in alt tags and image names you will just wind up with a crazy mess of words that will over optimise your website.
Next time someone asks you to stuff as many keywords as you can in content Id be inclined to show them a thing or to about why not to do down this path, whether they listen or not is their call but I know for one thing the whole idea of keyword stuffing is just not worth it.