How Keyword Stuffing Can Harm Website SEO & How To Prevent It

Keywords are words and phrases that SEO experts use in their web content in order to optimize the content for potential searchers. These relevant words and phrases are used in the content deliberately. When visitors search these keywords on their search engine, the search engine locates these words on pages across web and show results accordingly.

What is Keyword Stuffing And Why It Is Done?

There are only so many keywords you can use in one post. When overdone, the process is called keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the deliberate repetition of keywords i.e. stuffing in a post. The purpose is to manipulate the search engines’ rankings. Search engines use keyword density as one of the factors for ranking a website. Keyword density is the percentage times a keyword is used on a particular page. 

Does Keyword Stuffing Harm Your Website SEO?

It is important to cleverly use your keywords on a web page. However, overdoing anything is no good. If not kept in limit, keyword stuffing can lead to endangering your SEO. Search engines before used to work on a system where keyword density was a major ranking-determining factor. However, this also used to repeated bad user experience. Nobody wants to open a page reading ‘weight loss smoothies’ 800 times without finding anything actually helpful. User experience matters a lot to search engines. So initially you may see an increased influx of traffic but in the long term it can lead to penalization by:

• Demotion in ranking
• Removal of the website all together

So always check keyword density whenever you write blog post/Article. And keep keyword density within limits provided by Google.

Ways To Prevent Keyword Stuffing

They key is to realize that keyword usage helps your views find your website. It is important if you want audience searching for relevant content. So for example, in an article titled ’13 Reasons Why I love Cats’ with ‘cats’ as the keyword, the following would be an example of keyword stuffing:

‘Cats are nice. Cats are cool. I love cats. I have Persian cats. My cats have big eyes. My cats are never grumpy. I have 9 cats. My grandma has 6 cats. I hate people who don’t love cats. My cats are awesome. Cats are love. Do you want a cat? Cats are always the way to go.’

There is just a lot…. CATS! Don’t do that. One obvious replacement of the word cats in the above paragraph is the pronoun they. Another way to go about this would be to find synonyms. Google takes pride in not only finding content that is relevant but contextually relevant. So if you search something related to the word feet, Google knows that if this word is appearing in an article related to height, it is the unit of length. On the other hand, if it appearing on a blog owned by a shoe company, feet the part of the body meaning. Google also rewards websites that use synonyms. But this does not mean that you can’t use the same word again and again. You can, as long as it is not pushed in deliberately and makes sense. A keyword density of 2- 5 percent is fair.

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