In today’s small business landscape, search engine optimization (SEO) is much more than a trendy buzzword you hear. Anyone with a business website understands that SEO is the key strategy that helps your site to rank on search engines (the Yellow Pages of the internet) and draw the traffic you need to make your website hum and grow your business. Without a cogent SEO strategy in place on your website, your business will be relying on word of mouth or perhaps social media or some other method to bring new customers to your domain. If potential customers don’t already know about your business, they won’t know about it when surfing the web to find your product or service unless you rank competitively. The reason for that? It’s simple. Most people don’t migrate past page 2 of search engine results.
So one can understand if people are a bit aggressive about getting a spot on those first two pages. One way people achieved that loft goal back in the early days of SEO was through keyword stuffing.
What is Keyword Stuffing?
Keyword stuffing is the practice of adding search terms to your page in a way that is basically nonsensical and unnatural to language patterns, this in an effort to convince Google algorithms that your page should be ranked as an authority for that keyword. Let’s be clear. This is blackhat SEO strategy. It’s manipulative, dishonest and wholly unfair to the competition. It also happens to be dangerous to your own search strategy.
The fact is keyword stuffing is an ancient blackhat strategy. It’s so old that even blackhat SEOs don’t even use it anymore. Google’s algorithms actually began identifying this strategy almost a decade ago. And today, Google hit websites found to be using the practice by any number of punitive measures including de-indexing. And that is exactly what it sounds like, banishing the site from the Google index. And when you’ve been penalized by Google, getting back in the search engine’s good graces is not as simple as correcting the infraction that got you penalized in the first place. It takes months, even years of pristine online behavior to shake off the blackhat moniker once you’ve been blanked by Google.
So the next time you think about taking a shortcut and stuffing those keywords onto your web page… we’ll, just don’t. It doesn’t even give you the bang for your buck it used to. Google has de-emphasized the potency of keyword usage to take the thunder out of blackhat SEO’s strides. Search algorithms have grown sophisticated enough to evaluate page language in ways that take into account keyword synonym usage, sentence structure and logic, which not only identify when language strays off into a weird pattern of repeating a single keyword nonsensically, it flags the practice and sets your site up for a nice, juicy Google penalty.
So, instead of stuffing those keywords, simply create good, cogent useful content that convey your business’ knowledge of your industry, product and/or service. That way, you can actually rank well without fear of being banned from search. Because, who wants that?
If you would like to learn more about how Proctor Digital can help you develop a potent SEO strategy and power growth for your business online, call us at 773.664.5819. We’d love to help!