Keyword stuffing – are you damaging your website?

Getting to the top of search engines can be a  bit of an obsession for some businesses. The truth is this obsession can result in wasted time and money.  And so often the website suffers as a result of poor or lazy optimisation techniques.

I am sure you’ve seen plenty on websites with seemingly irrelevant words simply plonked in the header or the footer. This is quite a common practice for some SEO companies as it’s an easy way to work in keywords to a website.

But there are some real problems with this practise:

1. It looks really really horrible and can confuse your visitors.
2. Google clearly states in it best practices that website owners should do nothing to trick it’s algorithm and that doing so could result in blacklisting. Google much prefers and nice honest approach to the content on your website.
3. Google can spot duplicated content on web pages and decide to ignore it.
4. Stuffing the keywords on every page actually dilutes your keyword density per page.

There is a much nicer way – nicer for google and nicer for visitors!  For most businesses keywords fall into 2 groups: either a service/product provided or a location served. 

Working service/product related keywords into your website

1. Each service or product provided should have it’s own dedicated page.  The dedicated page will naturally be keyword rich.
2. Use the product/service name in the content a couple of times including in the headings.  Ideally you want a paragraph or two.
3. Include a glossary page in your website with a list of all your services/products.
4. Include a sitemap on your website with a list of your services products and links to relevant pages.
5. You can even put your main services/products in the footer as a mini sitemap.  The is not quite the same as simply plonking them in the footer since they have a clear purpose of quickly helping your visitors find content.

Working location related keywords into your website

Building in content related to the locations you serve can be a bit tricky.  It’s not as natural to have content on the website related to towns and countries.  You could try these

1. Include a page in the website listing the area’s served.
2. Include a case study page for each of your main area’s.  For example you could have a page called “Work completed in Guildford” and insert content related to clients in this area.
3. Include testimonials from clients in your served area’s and be sure to include the area in the credit. Eg “I was really happy with the service provide by.” Paul Smith, Guildford.
4. Include your address in the footer if related to the area’s you serve.
5. If you serve a very specific area then it’s fine to include this in the banner or footer. Something like “Serving Woking and Guildford”

Essentially content is king – and if you want to be found for a keyword then you need to use it!