Being positioned as well as possible in the search on the Internet for those words and topics that concern our products and services has become the norm of successful business today. This has especially come to the fore in recent months when, due to the pandemic, online has become a favorite form of business. We include keywords and phrases for which we want to be well positioned in our content on the site, and search engines use the presence of those words in our text as one of the parameters when selecting and ranking results. Of course, as in many other areas, manipulation attempts appeared very quickly in this part of optimization. The most famous attempt at such manipulation is what we call keyword stuffing. We deliberately use the term in the English language, since for now we do not have an adequate translation for this, we can call it a technical term. In the descriptive sense, keyword stuffing would be the excessive and indiscriminate use of keywords and phrases in the text, all with the aim of manipulating the search engine algorithm and better positioning.

In the old days of the internet, before search algorithms became as smart as they are today, people could game the system by inserting keywords into their posts and texts, often even ranking for keywords that had no direct relation to the website content itself. . Because at the time, Google and other search engines were not sophisticated enough to understand that just because a site contained text with certain keywords, it did not mean that the content provided a quality answer to the audience’s question, or even an answer at all. This is exactly why keyword stuffing is marked as one of the worst practices and started to be sanctioned by search engines, especially Google . Since then, Google and other search engines have become much more intelligent, taking into account semantic SEO and user search intent .

Keywords are still one of the main factors when it comes to optimization, but now they should be used much more carefully and meaningfully. We can often unknowingly overuse keywords, thereby risking a site penalty.

Why is keyword stuffing a bad practice?

On the technical side, keyword stuffing is bad because Google will penalize your site for it and not rank it in the search results. Getting blacklisted by Google is definitely not something you want. Recovery from these fines is very difficult and slow, and this automatically means huge losses for your business.

On the other hand, there is the user experience as one of the main ranking factors, which is threatened by keyword stuffing . Content readability and user intent are extremely important when you want to capture and retain the attention of users and audiences. You want to be concise, concise, and not waste your target audience’s time. And keyword stuffing certainly wastes their time. They came to your page with a specific query, looking for specific information. Keyword stuffing “hides” that information, making it less readable due to a lot of meaningless and redundant wording. Sometimes, when you forcefully try to use a keyword in the text, it simply stops making sense. And if visitors can’t find what they need just by scanning content, they’ll leave your site and click on the next search result.

There is a seemingly intuitive, but in practice completely wrong logic that misleads many when trying to optimize their content. Since search engines are designed to use keywords as triggers when displaying search results, many people wonder why they shouldn’t “stuff” the desired keyword as many times as possible into their text. Precisely because you will do much more harm than good.

Search engines are in the business of connecting audiences with content that will satisfy their search intent, which means they use algorithms that tend to favor high-quality informative content. When the content is not written in natural language, but is structured to cheat the algorithm, the result is usually incomprehensible and low-quality content that does not meet the needs of the site visitor and, in most cases, does not deserve their attention.

How to avoid keyword stuffing?

The best way to avoid this SEO mistake is to write content that people want to read. It’s kind of rule number 1 in creating internet content. Additionally, create content that answers people’s questions. Question-based keywords can produce excellent results. Make sure that the language of your text is natural. Think about the search terms you use, then look at the sites that are most useful to you. These are usually sites with organically written posts that answer your question. When you’re creating content that someone would want to read, keyword stuffing shouldn’t be a problem.

A great help can be provided by the WordPress plugin Yoast, which we wrote more about here . In analyzing your text, this tool will provide a lot of useful information, among which is a keyword density score. Yoast will determine whether you have used the keyword enough times for a text of that length, but also whether you may have used it more than is desirable.

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