Why Not Just Throw Every Keyword Possible on Your Page?
On the subject of keywords, one of the first thoughts that many people have is that they should take their list of keywords and stuff the page with those words as many times as possible.
This is known as keyword ‘cramming’.
While it’s good to place as many keywords as useful on a page, it is very easy to go over board and do too much. In the past this was a viable strategy; however today there are several reasons that this is a bad idea.
First there is the artistic problem of converting those keywords into text that makes sense to the humans who come to the website. Always remember your first priority is your human visitors, and it’s important to ensure they can read and enjoy what is on the website. If there is gibberish on the page then those humans you are working so hard to attract are going to click the back button as fast as they can.
Still want to cram as many keywords as possible on to your page? A simplistic answer for this problem, for some people, is to repeat keywords at the bottom of the page. People who do this often try to be clever and hide the words by making them the same color as the background. Search engine companies learned about this trick several years ago, and have designed their searches to ignore this information and even to penalize sites that use this trick.
This is the second reason it doesn’t make sense to stuff keywords on a page. Search engine companies such as Google and Yahoo are constantly reworking their search programs in order to give better results to their users and thus preventing websites from cheating their way to the top of the results pages. If the search engine sees too many of the same words and phrases over and over again it will rank a page lower in results than one without multiple repeats. The old tricks that used to work just a few years ago are no longer effective; and worse, they make your website look unprofessional.
Many people assume that the search engines only look at words that are right next to each other. I think that this is because in unseen code of the webpage Meta Tag Keywords you can use commas to group words and search engines do pay attention to those groupings.
However, in the visible text each time a word appears is counted towards the total count for that word. For example, if your website uses the phrases Accounting Software, Management Software and Network Management software search engines count software three times, management twice and Network and Accounting.
It’s possible to accidentally use a keyword too often. If the same word keeps appearing over and over again search engines will start downgrading the position of the website in the search results.
The real solution is that one must carefully craft the text that goes on the website so that the keywords are there for the search engine but are easy to read for the humans who come to the site. When editing the text always double check that each keyword does not repeat too many times.
Finding the best keywords and making the best use of them will give you better results than trying to trick or cheat your way to the top of the search results. If your website shows old tricks the search engines may not be your only problem. Your potential customers will wonder what tricks you might try on them.
Next week we will discuss how to settle on the best keywords.
Technorati Tags: keywords, stuffing, cramming, search engines, penalize
This article was first published February 19, 2009 on the Tatum Marketing blog
On the subject of keywords, one of the first thoughts that many people have is that they should take their list of keywords and stuff the page with those words as many times as possible.
This is known as keyword ‘cramming’.
While it’s good to place as many keywords as useful on a page, it is very easy to go over board and do too much. In the past this was a viable strategy; however today there are several reasons that this is a bad idea.
First there is the artistic problem of converting those keywords into text that makes sense to the humans who come to the website. Always remember your first priority is your human visitors, and it’s important to ensure they can read and enjoy what is on the website. If there is gibberish on the page then those humans you are working so hard to attract are going to click the back button as fast as they can.
Still want to cram as many keywords as possible on to your page? A simplistic answer for this problem, for some people, is to repeat keywords at the bottom of the page. People who do this often try to be clever and hide the words by making them the same color as the background. Search engine companies learned about this trick several years ago, and have designed their searches to ignore this information and even to penalize sites that use this trick.
This is the second reason it doesn’t make sense to stuff keywords on a page. Search engine companies such as Google and Yahoo are constantly reworking their search programs in order to give better results to their users and thus preventing websites from cheating their way to the top of the results pages. If the search engine sees too many of the same words and phrases over and over again it will rank a page lower in results than one without multiple repeats. The old tricks that used to work just a few years ago are no longer effective; and worse, they make your website look unprofessional.
Many people assume that the search engines only look at words that are right next to each other. I think that this is because in unseen code of the webpage Meta Tag Keywords you can use commas to group words and search engines do pay attention to those groupings.
However, in the visible text each time a word appears is counted towards the total count for that word. For example, if your website uses the phrases Accounting Software, Management Software and Network Management software search engines count software three times, management twice and Network and Accounting.
It’s possible to accidentally use a keyword too often. If the same word keeps appearing over and over again search engines will start downgrading the position of the website in the search results.
The real solution is that one must carefully craft the text that goes on the website so that the keywords are there for the search engine but are easy to read for the humans who come to the site. When editing the text always double check that each keyword does not repeat too many times.
Finding the best keywords and making the best use of them will give you better results than trying to trick or cheat your way to the top of the search results. If your website shows old tricks the search engines may not be your only problem. Your potential customers will wonder what tricks you might try on them.
Next week we will discuss how to settle on the best keywords.
Thu, Nov 5, 2009
Conversion Optimization, Strategy, Traffic
Written by: Eric Gerds