The rules of search engine optimization, or SEO, are constantly changing. Best practices that worked five years ago or even last year may no longer be effective. And as we’ve mentioned, there’s a difference between black hat SEO and white hat SEO.
Why is Keyword Stuffing Bad?
You know that keywords help your content rank in search engine results, so it would make sense to add your keyword as often as possible in every paragraph throughout the piece, whether or not it reads well. However, this is known as keyword stuffing. It used to be an acceptable SEO practice, but it’s now considered black hat and spammy.
One method of keyword stuffing is to add the keyword as many times as possible. In this case, you might see a sentence like, “SEO best practices are the most important SEO best practices, so if you want to know more about SEO best practices, contact an SEO best practices expert in Elmhurst.” This sentence reads very awkwardly, and there’s no way a person would speak like that.
Another method of keyword stuffing is to hide them, making the keywords the same color as the text, adding them in the code, or making the font size 0, so they appear invisible.
How Does Stuffing Keywords Affect SEO?
Search engines now focus on user intent to provide the best possible answers to user questions. Content that uses keyword stuffing is written for search engines, not humans. So when a piece about copywriting in Hinsdale reads artificially, Google and other search engines will pass it up in favor of content that reads naturally and provides helpful information.
Not only does this SEO practice affect your rankings with search engines, but it affects the user experience on your website as well. If a current or potential client or customer visits your website and reads a keyword-stuffed blog, they’re going to be turned off by it. This doesn’t reflect well on your brand, and you may lose that business to the competition.
What to Do Instead
It’s a better and smarter idea to follow proper SEO best practices instead. Since we know search engines focus on user intent, you’ll want to conduct some keyword research to see what related words and phrases have high search volumes for your industry.
Once you have an idea of solid keywords, you can create content around those, including them organically through your blogs and webpages.
To learn more about SEO best practices, EQ Technology Group in Oak Brook can help. Contact us to find out how.