Costly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid - Keyword Abuse
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The misuse of keywords could almost fill a chapter in a book of SEO mistakes all by itself. This can cover a lot of ground, really, because there are so many creative ways you can hurt yourself with these things. From the reading I’ve done on the subject, keywords should be treated like the spices in a mild curry -- use enough so that they're noticeable, but not so much that the flavor integrity of the whole dish gets drowned out.
There are a number of places you should not use your keywords multiple times. That is called keyword stuffing, and may be treated like spam by the search engines. These include your meta tags, image alt tags, titles and headers (write good titles and headers; don’t stuff them!), and so on. Frankly, you should just avoid keyword stuffing altogether. Likewise, please do not include the same meta description and keywords on every page! Search engines look at these when they perform duplicate content checks, so you could actually be penalized for a lack of creativity. You want to have different title elements and headers on your pages, too.
Don’t even think of coming up with devious ways to do keyword stuffing, such as hidden text (using white text on a white background so only the search engines see it). Yes, the search engines are wise to this trick, and it’s likely to get you penalized. If you think you can get away with it by using external cascading style sheets (CSS) to control the font color, think again. The search engines know about that trick too.
There are other ways to abuse keywords that may not hurt as badly, so much as make you pull your hair out. If you’ve heard of the long tail, then you know you shouldn’t be targeting overly general keywords. They’re nearly impossible to rank for. If you’re an accountant in San Francisco, you should be trying to rank for “San Francisco accountant,” not “accountant.” You could even try “San Francisco small business accounting,” if that’s your specialty. If you optimize your site for keywords that are both relevant and specific, you will receive targeted traffic that is much more likely to convert.
Finally, let’s look at content again, from the keyword perspective. That brings up keyword density. Please don’t start obsessing over getting the perfect percentage of keywords in your content. Yes, they should be in your text, but as I mentioned before, you don’t want them to overwhelm things. Please remember that you’re not writing for the search engines; you’re writing for human readers. And we get tired when we see the same word over and over again. Let your text flow naturally. If you’re writing on a topic that is relevant to your site, the keywords will fall naturally into place. Good luck!
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