If your plan is to have a very successful website, one of your main goals is to invest time into making your search engine optimization good. If you have been a website owner for a while, you certainly are already familiar with the term SEO which is short for search engine optimization. And you also must already know how important it is for it to be good. SEO helps your website rank higher on Google search. And keywords are an important part of your website and its SEO. But how does Google explain keyword stuffing? Too much of anything can be a bad idea, let us tell you what it does to your SEO.
What are keywords?
Let’s start from the beginning and first cover what actually are keywords. You cannot put anything as a keyword as not everything can be one. Keywords are words or phrases that you choose that are related to your website. These are words or phrases people usually type into the search bar when searching for that what they need.
For example, “pet shop” is a keyword and all pet shops are going to be using this same keyword. But that is not the only keyword related to a pet shop. People search for other things to find a pet shop too. For example, someone might search for dog food or cat toys. And if you are a pet shop, you certainly have both of these and in order for your website to pop up among these searches as well, you need to include them in your keywords. You need to know just how people use Google search before you start choosing your keywords.
Types of keywords
There are different types of keywords, not just one. This is why you have to think wisely before you choose them. And there are nine types of keywords:
- short tail
- longtail
- short-term
- long-term
- product defining
- customer defining
- geo-targeting
- intent targeting.
You have to pick good keywords for each type of these nine as they all have a major effect on your search engine optimization. But this sure sounds like there are a lot of keywords to include. Well, including too many keywords is not a good idea at all. There is this strategy people call keyword stuffing. And if you do not know what it is and why doing it is a bad idea, we are here to tell you more about it. You can also hire Link Department services to better your SEO even more.
What is keyword stuffing?
If there are nine types of keywords you must include nine different keywords. Sometimes, more phrases and words can be used as keywords for one group. And that is a good thing to do certainly. This means that your website will appear on multiple different places on the internet by searching for different words which certainly means that the chances of your website getting a bigger audience is bigger as well.
People who do search engine optimization know this. And a lot of them wanted to take a step towards finding a bigger audience by including a larger number of keywords. When they did so, they were shocked. This is when keyword stuffing as a strategy started to exist.
Keyword stuffing is when you use too many phrases and words as keywords. These can be real keywords related to your website and even keywords that have nothing to do with your website. Even if you are no expert for SEO, you might be able to conclude that too many keywords that are not related to your website are a bad thing to include. This certainly doesn’t mean you cannot include keyword-rich anchor texts. Let us explain why keyword stuffing is not something you should be doing and just how Google views websites that do this.
So, what is Google’s explanation of keyword stuffing?
As a lot of people use Google as their search engine as it is one of the best and most reliable ones out there, we want to focus on how Google explains websites that do keyword stuffing. You know how Google can be picky when it comes to SEO. There are many things it likes and doesn’t like. Well, keyword stuffing is surely something Google doesn’t like. In life, too much of anything is bad even if it is something that is good. This same rule applies to Google and SEO. Too much of anything that is generally good is a bad idea.
When Google notices a website that uses the strategy of keyword stuffing, it certainly doesn’t do things to its advantage. Keyword stuffing is basically cheating that leads your website into a disaster. Even if these are some very similar keywords, try not to use too many of them. Google likes when keywords are naturally placed throughout the website. This way the users don’t feel “attacked” by keywords which gives them a more pleasant user experience which is just what Google likes.
This means that if you try and keyword stuff your website, Google will recognize this and your website will be marked as not user-friendly. And the only thing this leads to is your website ranking much lower than it did and you will certainly have a very hard time recovering from this fall as Google really doesn’t like when someone uses this strategy to try and better their ranking. You need to know just how to avoid keyword stuffing and keep your keyword density natural. Hiring professionals for the job is the best thing to do.