Keyword stuffing is in exact opposition to SEO. It is spam at its worst. Keyword stuffing is done in a way to please search engine spiders. Yet human readers are not taken into account and when landing on a webpage that practices keyword stuffing, it is a difficult takes to read and understand what the message is.

Keyword stuffing has no concern for the human reader, their masters want results fast and they don’t care how they get them. Yet when discovered they will get penalized and their website may simply disappear along with their rankings. Keyword stuffing has no place in SEO practice.

Content stuffed with keywords

Content that is stuffed full of keywords does not present a normal reading experience. Readers are distracted and get annoyed when they see the same keyword or keyword phrases repeated again and again and again. They will simply lose interest and go somewhere else to find what they are looking for. In essence keyword stuffing can have the exact opposite result of what it is aiming for.

Instead of keyword stuffing balance content and keywords. There is a certain percentage ratio that makes sense to an article and keeps it sounding natural and easy to read or navigate. The aim is to provide content that is both reader and search engine friendly.

Methods of keyword stuffing and how to avoid it

While some keyword stuffing is acceptable search engines have become savvy to the practice. In response to keyword stuffing they have refined their algorithms to detect it.

The most obvious method of keyword stuffing is by attempting to hide the keyword so that visitors aren’t aware it is there, yet search engines are. This is done by hiding them in the Meta tags, embedded in the content. These take the form of NoScript tags and are a way to hide keywords from human readers.

Keyword stuffing can also be done by making keywords the same color as the background. This makes them invisible to the reader. Another technique involved on keyword stuffing is to place text behind an image and out of sight of a visitor.

A slight variation to keyword stuffing entails a webmaster putting up the same site at a host of other domains. This is correctly called mirroring and while at time it is a good way to handle high traffic volumes, it is not considered an ethical SEO technique.

Search engines will flag a site that shows a high number of keywords or keyword phrases. This flag indicates that these websites are spam sites.

In order to prevent keyword stuffing all keywords should be used in adherence with SEO practice and search engine algorithms. They should be necessary yet relevant in their number.

Once upon a time search engines were unable to interpret and fully understand keyword stuffing. This is not the case today. They now employ methods and techniques that are fully able to relate to and understand keyword techniques and interpret their intention on a webpage.

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