Stop Keyword Stuffing Your Pages – It’s Stupid!

AcnePreventionEtc.com - SEO Project #2 - Update 2
1 Hour Spent on Cleaning Up Keyword Stuffed Pages - 39 Hours Left

In the words of my 7 year old daughter, "Keyword stuffing is so first grade." It may have worked when Google was in it's mere infancy, but now it is easily detectable and you'll have ZERO chance of ranking for anything important if you are doing it. It's that simple.

If you aren't familiar with keyword stuffing, let me explain. According to Wiki, keyword stuffing is an unethical search engine optimization technique. The truth of the matter is you aren't optimizing anything. It's easily detected and it's a great way to get your site penalized or banned.

How To Keyword Stuff A Page

There are many ways to keyword stuff a page. Here are a few of the most popular.

1. Meta tags are the portion of your page in the header that contain your page description and the keywords you would use to describe your page. It isn't seen by visitors to your site, but it is seen by the search engines. Simple keyword stuffing involves filling these two meta tags repeatedly with the keyword you are targeting.

2. Another popular method of keyword stuffing involves writing articles that use a keyword over and over in an unnatural way. This method was a little more difficult to detect until Google started using Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. LSI works by analyzing relationships between words and is designed to distinguish naturally written text from keyword-stuffed documents. LSI considers natural and synonymous relationship between words.

In layman's terms, if you are using the same keyword over and over on your pages in hopes of ranking higher, Google can figure it out and will penalize you for it. The key here is to write for your site users and not the search engines. If you do this you'll be fine.

3. Another commonly used method of keyword stuffing involves placing keywords in your alt image tags. Let me explain.

When you put an image on your page, you can enter an optional attribute called "alt".  Here is what the attribute looks like when added to the image tag.  <img src="yourpic.jpg"  alt="name of your image" /> The intended purpose of the alt attribute is to show visitors who don't have the ability to view images in their browser, the text included after the "alt" attribute.

The "alt" attribute should contain information about what the image is about followed by the word "image", "picture", or "pic".

Here is an image file that contains an alt attribute used correctly.

<img src="mydog.jpg"  alt="my dog's image" />

Here is an image file that contains an alt attribute used incorrectly.

<img src="mydog.jpg"  alt="dog collars, dog toys, dog trainer" />

I'm A Reformed Moron

When I first setup AcnepreventionEtc.com, I thought stuffing keywords on my pages was going to give me the added push I needed to rank.  What can I say, I was stupid!  I think the first step to getting this site back on track is to right my wrongs and clean up those pages.  It's taken nearly an hour to do, but all the extra keywords have been removed.

Posted by: Brent Crouch on 04 Apr, 20092 Comments »