6 Tips to Avoid Keyword Stuffing
With so many businesses on the web, the competition to be constantly seen online is very tough. Rather than going about ranking higher on search engines the wrong way, by stuffing a lot of relevant and irrelevant keywords in the meta tags area or in the main content, adopt other credible and current strategies used for properly optimizing your website for search engines.
In actual fact, keyword stuffing does more harm than good to the ranking of a website on any search engine. A keyword is a crucial aspect of search engine optimization because it is an important word or strings of words that are relevant to the main focus area of the main content. As a result, such words or strings of words might appear severally in the content.
A while back, keyword stuffing used to be one of the best SEO strategies. Unfortunately, some people subconsciously still use this method thinking there’s no harm in it. If you aren’t sure how to use it or you want to know how to avoid stepping on those landmines, the assistance of a good content marketing agency will come in handy. Also, consider the following six tips.
1. Avoid repeating words in ways that sound uninteresting or unnatural
Always treat your content like a prose work, not poetry. Poetry employs a lot of repetition because of the effects that it creates in the mind of the reader and hearer but repetition kills the interest of the reader quicker than a bomb. Take for example this text about Pampers:
“Pampers commitment goes beyond creating products. We are involved in continuous research and development to ensure that your baby’s needs always come first. Your baby’s safety is our highest priority. Learn more about Pamper’s safe, high-quality products, which help you to protect and care for your baby.”
Beautifully written text, right? Now take a look at this version:
“Pampers commitment goes beyond creating products like our Pampers diapers for babies. Our unique baby diapers brands are involved in continuous research and development to ensure that your baby’s diaper needs always come first. Your baby’s safety when using Pampers diapers is our highest priority. Learn more about Pamper’s safe, high-quality baby diapers, which help you to protect and care for your baby.”
How did you feel reading through that? Felt like all you were reading was “Pampers” and “baby diapers” alone right? Even if it’s not how you felt, reading through the second text must have been less interesting than the first one.
2. Switch in-between single keywords to long tail keywords
You don’t have to rely on one or two keywords throughout a text. Rather make use of long tail keywords that fit well into the text. These long tail keywords should be relevant to what you are writing about, and it should also be properly researched to ensure that it is what people you are targeting and what is most likely to enter into a search engine. This yields more results rather than repeating a single keyword.
3. Creatively make use of synonyms
The idea behind Google and other search engines frowning at keywords stuffing is that it washes down the relevance of the content to the user. These search engines are focused on creating the best user experience, and this involves providing information that is 100% relevant to what users are looking for (hence the need to rank websites in order of relevance). Keywords, long tail or short, should not be used more than five to seven times throughout the text. After doing this, if you still find yourself repeating the keywords, stop and look for synonyms of that particular word that best fit what you are trying to say.
4. Use a unique target keyword for every page on your website
Unique keywords are very useful; however, manually doing this on your website can be pretty tedious. If you are using a WordPress site, you can install plugins that will help with this aspect. One very popular WordPress plugin that is free to use is Yoast SEO. It helps with ensuring that the main keyword is in key areas like the title, image file name, in the main content, meta tag and other important areas. It also notifies you if you have previously used a target keyword, so you can use a different target keyword for that page. If you are not using a WordPress site, consider other plugins you can get to help you do this easily.
5. Write a very detailed content
This is one of the easiest ways to avoid keyword stuffing. Write good content! It is not very difficult to put a lot of thought and effort into writing good content that would not make search engines frown at your website and probably flag it down. Writing very good content implies that you want the target audience you are writing for to find it relevant to them and establish a form of bond with them that would encourage them to keep coming for more relevant content. For such detailed and lengthy content, make use of subheadings and create a table of contents that readers can easily click on to navigate subheadings of the content they want to read.
6. Make use of secondary keywords as well
Primary keywords are the target keyword that you hope to get ranked for (which you might have used as the target keyword for the website, as mentioned earlier), while the secondary keywords are the ones that are closely related to the primary ones. If you are not sure about the secondary keywords to use, type in the primary keywords on any search engine, scroll to the end of the search results page, you will see a list of related searches. These are some secondary keywords that will be relevant to what you are writing so creatively include it in the body of the main text.