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Keyword Stuffing

Last updated: Aug 25, 2023

https://cmlabs.co/en-au/seo-terms/keyword-stuffing

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What Is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is the practice of adding excessive keywords in an article with the aim of increasing the website's ranking in search results. This practice is considered an SEO spam technique that has a negative impact on the implementation of website SEO.

Two techniques that are often used are inserting the same keywords too many times and using keywords that are not relevant to the topic of the page. In addition, it can also be done by adding keywords in places that are not visible to the reader, such as meta tags and alt tags.

Why Is Keyword Stuffing Bad For SEO?

This is a practice that doesn't comply with SEO best practices and violates Google's guidelines. This is because it only focuses on adding excessive keywords to get website rankings, without considering whether the content produced has answered user needs.

According to Google's quality guidelines, keyword stuffing can provide a poor user experience and can hurt your website's ranking. Therefore, you should focus on creating useful content and containing the information that users need. Make sure the keywords you use are relevant to the topics discussed in the content.

In addition, some of the bad impacts caused by keyword stuffing techniques are as follows:

Make articles not user-friendly. The addition of excessive keywords makes the content difficult for readers to understand. This can make them leave your website and cause website performance to decline.
Potentially penalized by search engines. Content that repeats too many keywords can be indicated as spam and penalized by Google.
Make articles uninteresting to share. Excessive keyword usage will discourage people from sharing your content.

How to Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Since it brings disadvantages to your SEO implementation, web owners and content writers should avoid implementing this practice. Here are some tactics you can use to avoid it:

Define Target Keywords

First, the thing you can do to avoid this bad practice is to do keyword research. Make sure you have chosen target keywords that are relevant to the website's niche and the topics that will be discussed in the content.

Distribute Keywords Naturally

In creating content, the most important thing is not repeating the target keyword as much as possible, but choosing a suitable position to insert these keywords naturally. Here is a list of the strategic positions to put keywords in:

Title
Meta description
Slug (article link)
The first paragraph of content
Heading
Content
Image captions and alt tags

Pay Attention to Keyword Density

Keyword density is a percentage that shows the number of times a keyword is mentioned in an article. The reason why you need to pay attention to this is to avoid excessive keyword usage so that the article is easier to read.

As we know, a fairly high percentage of keyword density can reduce SEO quality. Therefore, you need to maintain the ideal density percentage and not make the content indicated as spam.

Create SEO-Friendly Articles

The last step to avoid this bad practice is to write SEO-friendly articles. If you focus too much on search engines, you may add as many keywords as possible in order to improve website rankings.

In fact, this is not the right practice to improve content performance. Therefore, you should focus on producing content that is useful for readers. Thus, search engines will rate your content as quality content.

Tool to Check Keyword Stuffing

One way to avoid keyword stuffing is to know the density of the target keywords in your content. Therefore, you can use the Word Counter tool from cmlabs to help you check keyword density.

The recommended density score for main keywords is no more than 1-2% of the entire article. If the keyword density in your content exceeds that number, it is potentially considered spam by search engines.