How and Why You Should Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing will cause your bounce rates to rise and your rankings to plummet. Here’s how you can avoid it.
For businesses big and small, SEO should be the foundation of their marketing strategy. Driving organic traffic to your website will give rise to precipitous growth. But SEO is a science, and—like any science—it takes some time to learn. One of the most common mistakes made by beginners optimizing web content is known as ‘keyword stuffing.’ Today, we’ll share with you how and why you can avoid keyword stuffing on your website.
What Is Keyword Stuffing?
You may be able to guess what keyword stuffing is just by the name of it. Essentially, it is the act of inserting the keyword for which you would like to rank too frequently into your copy.
To optimize a piece of web content for a particular keyword, you’ll have to include it a couple of times. The novice might feel tempted to use it every chance they can get. But when you stuff a keyword into your website, your SEO will take a dive.
But at what point exactly does excessive employment of a keyword become stuffing? There is no ‘magic number’ we can point to because it depends on the length of your copy. Instead, you should shoot for a keyword density of about 2%. This is the percentage you get when you divide your word count by the frequency of the keyword.
Why You Should Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Simply put, keyword stuffing will harm your SEO. Search engines will recognize a high keyword density as a cheap tactic intended to help you rank, and penalize you as a result. Google may even eliminate an overstuffed page from its SERPs.
Remember that the goal of a search engine is to find content genuinely helpful to the searcher. Content that has been stuffed with a keyword is not likely to read well. Even if there is valuable information in there, it will be overshadowed by poor readability. Your bounce rate will rise, and your rankings will plummet.
All you need to do to avoid keyword stuffing is to aim for that 2% keyword density. A little higher or a little lower is no big deal. If you realize retroactively that you may have stuffed your copy, fixing it is simple enough. Just use synonyms or other long-tail variations in its place. You’ll see the dual benefit of more readable content and higher organic rankings.
Over-reliance on your keyword will undermine the efficacy of your SEO strategy. By shooting for a 2% keyword density, you can avoid falling victim to this all-too-familiar trap.
Contact Adventure Web Interactive Today
For more tips on how to optimize your web content and drive more traffic to your business, follow our blog. Adventure Web Interactive offers expert marketing solutions, including blogging, copywriting, and social media management. Take the stress of planning, posting, and plotting off of your team and contact us online or by giving us a call at (410) 788-7007. To see more information about our team and services, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
