Keyword stuffing is an undesirable SEO practice which many search engines consider as being a black hat technique. Google refer to it as loading a webpage with keywords in order to influence their rankings. They believe that it affects a users experience negatively which in their books does more harm to rankings than good. They look for and will only accommodate information rich content that uses keywords in the appropriate ratio. In a nutshell the ratio of keywords to content should not exceed 5-6% to be safe. This figure can be pushed up a little if the writing doesn’t sound forced, but should never exceed 10%.

Using this practice and getting found out by their spiders will get you penalized by search engines that are apt to push your rankings further down the list than they would. The reason that search engines frown on keyword stuffing is because they are committed to offering human readers information that is easy to read and applicable to their searches. Anything less and the search engine suffer. Users will not hesitate in going to another search engine in favour of useable information. Anything that lowers the users experience will result in penalization by a search engine.

How is Keyword Stuffing done?

The most common way of practicing keyword stuffing is by filling the Meta tags with every key phrase you can may be relevant. Meta tags should only comprise of keyword phrases that actually represent the content or theme that follows. It should not contain keywords that are not aimed at optimizing, in other words keywords that you would can sneak in for optimization and which have nothing to do with the content of the webpage. Stuffing Meta tags with keywords will also get you into more trouble as far as keyword stuffing goes that is.

Stuffing the Meta tag entails using only keywords but no sentence structure. This is considered a bad example of a Meta tag. A good Meta description would contain a sentence structure using the keyword the keyword as its basis. It would also make use of other specific keywords that are related to the webpage. Instead of something such as “clothes, clothing, drapery, apparel, fabric, material” a good Meta tag would read along the lines of ” find great clothing and apparel constructed of the best quality materials available for drapery at www.clothing.com”.

From this example it is forgivable that there are many who practice keyword stuffing inadvertently. However the results are the same whether it is done or purpose or through ignorance.

There are ways to prevent accidental keyword stuffing

As with most things in life if there is a problem there is sure to be a solution. The first thing to do is examine your Meta tag in order to ascertain if they are following the rules. Many search engines offer free tools the help with this task. They offer a quick and certain way to check if your Meta tags are faulty.

Others things one should check are whether keywords are hidden in text, title tags or in alt attributes. If you are a victim of being found out you need to make changes and once done and you are happy you are not longer in violation of rules it will be necessary to submit your site for reconsideration.

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