How to fix keyword stuffing

Relevant keywords, used in a sensible and natural way, are vital to generate the right kind of traffic to your site.

However, many sites go overboard, using them in a clearly unnatural way. These sites are likely to suffer in Google rankings as Google's algorithm has clamped down on keyword stuffing.

They may also find that users will bounce off the page quickly if the content isn't up to scratch. This is another bad indicator to the search engines.

Keyword stuffing explained

Keyword stuffing, also known as spamdexing is a primitive attempt to increase your site's ranking. It is done by packing a page full of keyword and phrases. This is done unnaturally, and with little regard to how useful the content might actually be for the user. Or, how it may affect the reading experience for the user.

Once upon a time, this was a very popular tactic, and it did work! However, crawlers have improved rapidly and can now detect unnatural keyword stuffing.

Nowadays, it is likely your site will be severely penalized, deindexed, or simply drop out of the rankings if they detect signs of abuse.

Not only this, but keyword stuffing offers a negative experience for the user, and is unlikely to:

1. Keep the user on the page for long, increasing your bounce rate.
2. Result in any conversion or click on any CTA.

User experience is incredibly important to search engines like Google. Without a good experience, users will begin to look elsewhere, this is not what the search engines want!

Examples of keyword stuffing

• Repeating keywords or key phrases too much, in a manner that is not natural.
• Mentioning geographic locations (towns, states etc) too often while trying to rank locally.
• Stuffing keywords ate the end of normal content.
• Making the foreground and background color the same so that the text is invisible to the human eye.
• Positioning an image in front of a load of keywords to hide them.
• Choosing a font size zero, so that the text is invisible.
• Inserting repetitive words in HTML comments and tags, such as image ALT tags.
• Using keywords that do not match the page's topic.

How to fix keyword stuffing

Firstly, you may need to establish if you have examples of keyword stuffing on your site.

For this our SEO audit > Over optimization tool is ideal.

This will indicate any instances on your website of content being overly optimized (e.g. where keyword stuffing has occurred).

The only solution then is to revisit the page or article, strip out any offending content and start again (making sure it obeys all the rules of good SEO content). There is no shortcut or magic fix.

Observing good keyword density

We tend to express keyword density as a percentage of the page’s total word count.

Most experts recommend that you keep your keywords to below 3% of the pages total content. So, in an article of 1000 words, use your keyword 30 times maximum.

Anything over this and you risk a penalty.

We’d always recommend adjusting your KD based on what the top performers are using on their pages. This is a more subjective and likely accurate measurement of what Google wants your pages to include.

Forget density, write good content that flows!

Although we have just discussed keyword density, this is more of a marker of what not to go over. The main aim in your head should be to write natural, good quality content.

Once this is done you can then tweak to ensure you have enough iterations of your selected keywords.

Assign just one primary keyword or phrase to every page

Every page should have a primary focus, this primary keyword or phrase should represent this. Of course, you can also have secondary keywords to help back this up.

The most important location for your primary keyword or phrase

The following locations are the most important for telling the search engines what your content is about:

• The page's URL.
• Page title and in all <title> tags.
• Meta description and other meta tags.
• Page's headline: <h1>.
• Subheadings: <h2> and <h3>.
• Image description and/ or caption and it's filename.
• Image ALT text.

Select up to four secondary keywords

Secondary keywords should enhance the content, and have semantic relevance to the primary keyword. Yet again, you must ensure your secondary keywords are not overused.

The 3% or less rule should still be followed.

If you are curious on how to find the best keywords for your content check out our content optimizer. It analyzes your site and your competitors, and then gives you an indication on what keywords you should be going after.

Consider variants and long tail keywords 

Many keyword terms that include 'buy' or 'best' tend to be massively oversaturated. Meaning high competition and low reward. Google's algorithm is highly developed and will be able to recognize synonyms of such words.

For example, you should use:

“get”

“obtain”

“acquire”

Instead of “buy”

These keywords will be less popular and therefore less saturated.

Long tailed keywords are also very powerful, especially on Amazon listings. Basically, you wrap your primary keyword inside of a short phrase. This short phrase may have relatively low volume of searches but can have strong purchasing intent.

For example:

A primary keyword "rich roast coffee" can be made into a longtail keyword phrase such as:

"Buy the best rich roast coffee in Chicago"

or

"What makes dark rich roast coffee so flavorsome?"

This way you add value to your primary keyword and incorporate good secondary keywords at the same time. In fact, nowadays, nearly half of all searches made by users, use more than one word.

Why LSI (latent semantic indexing) can make a big difference

As we know, Google wants to give the user the best experience. That means it's vital that the send them to good websites that correspond to the users search term. This is where LSI comes into play.

LSI means using words and terms in your copy that you would expect to see when reading good information about your search term.

For example:

A piece of content with a primary keyword of "architecture" might also contain related words such as:

"building"

"architect"

"constructed"

"design"

"steel"

"modern"

"glass"

"timber"

and so on.

LSI can improve both SEO and the user experience, and is also likely to occur when writing in depth on a topic anyway.

Summary: best use of keywords

Consistent keyword research and good writing are the pillars you should be striving for.

Using primary, secondary keywords, and LSI within the right density is key to creating content that Google and the user will love.

You can use our specialized content optimizer for recommendations on how and what keywords to implement to improve your site's success.

Good content and successful keyword optimization are key to giving you that edge on your competition.