I recently received a request from a reader to clarify exactly what “keyword stuffing” is.
Basically, keyword stuffing is predominantly a black hat seo technique meant to trick (or “influence”) the search engines into indexing a web page for more terms then are relevant to the content found on the page.
‘Keyword stuffing’ is evident when a laundry list of terms appears in the title tag and meta tags.
Worst offenders may include terms that are often searched in the engines yet have nothing at all to do with the page or even site.
If your company sells several things, as most do, all of the terms related to them should not be mentioned in the title tag or stuffed into the meta tags on each page. They should not be stuffed into the web page copy either for that matter.
(For those of you who have no idea what a meta keywords tag is, it is an element of your web page that is used by the web developer to provide more information to the search engines about your web page. It looks like this: <meta name = “keywords” content=“key word phrase” />)
Because of the abuse of this tag Google no longer even relies on the information placed here to determine relevance.
There are many variations on this kind of keyword deception. Invisible text is another black hat seo technique used to improve relevance by increasing keyword density or the number of keywords on the page in relation to all the text on the page. The keywords are placed on the web page using the same color as the page’s background so that they cannot be seen by people but they will be scanned by the search engine spiders.
Search Engines have matured enough to be wise to most black hat tactics and the penalties for engaging in illegitimate search engine optimization practices are pretty steep. They may include a total ban of the offender’s web pages from the engine.
The best practice is to play by the rules. Keep your web page content highly focused. If you sell many types of products create a product group landing page and then a separate landing page for each product type.
Help the search engines to index and retrieve your web pages by making their job easy.
To learn more about keywords and ranking see my blog post Effective SEO Tip When Looking to Rank for Additional Key Word Phrases.
What if you have a page that wants to highlight all the different things you sell? Like, if I sell paint and paint supplies, should I not have a page that points people to the paint section, drop cloth section, tape section, etc?
I guess I am asking if a ‘table of contents’ page would be a keyword stuffing page.
That’s a great question and very realistic scenario.
First and foremost, think of the site visitor, your prospective buyer, and walk them down a path that makes sense. That trumps everything else since the human buyer, and their experience while on your site, should be your primary concern.
Create that section / sub-section architecture on paper first and even decide where / when in the flow you may want to allow the buyer to link to supporting or related pages of content you may have in the site.
Now, look at that chart and create themes for each page. Ask yourself “What exactly is THIS page about?” If it is a high-level page meant to allow the buyer to know which path off that page they should follow based on their need, use well researched key word phrases in the meta data that support that theme. The page that is giving the buyer a selection of say “Painters Tape” may have Title Tag of… “Blue Painter’s Tape & Supplies, Painter’s Supplies, Painters Tape Dispensers” while a specific tape page may include exact attributes of that particular tape a buyer may be searching for in the Search Engines. A Table of Contents type of page, as well as a site map, will never work against you. The key is not to cram everything the site is about on every page.
Thanks for the answer which was way better than my question. I’ll bet most people would be worried about what their chart would look like now!