The basis of all search engine rankings is keywords. Since majority of traffic to websites is brought in by search engines, keywords are an important part of the substance of any web content and require extra special attention. Unfortunately, many SEOs end up resorting to renegade tactics such as keyword stuffing in an attempt to achieve the coveted first page search engine ranking.

What is keyword stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is overloading the content or meta tags of the web page with every possible keyword or phrase that relates to the site in many different forms. More commonly, keyword stuffing is accomplished by hiding the keyword, so visitors don’t see it, but search engines do. The practice is designed to direct traffic to the site by raising the site’s ranking in search results in the hopes of increasing site income. While some amount of keyword stuffing is considered legitimate, even smart, SEO webmasters who go overboard give the practice a bad name

Does keyword stuffing work?

Keyword stuffing doesn’t work because when the search engine crawler examines a site, its algorithm can quickly determine unreasonable use of keywords. If  a website contains an unnaturally high density of one single keyword, the site will actually drop in the rankings rather than rise.  In some cases, the site could be removed from the search engine index completely.

Correct keyword density

Not all search engines treat keyword density the same. Some only place significance on keywords in your title or meta tags, others like Google, place the most significance on keywords in your web page text. Many SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 3 to 7 percent. If the copy does not read clearly and smoothly or make complete sense, it is considered keyword stuffing. Use a keyword density analyzer can check the keyword density of a web page. This can tell  if too many or too few words have been used in the web copy.