With Thanksgiving around the corner, you may already have the delicious dinner on your mind. Between the turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole and stuffing, there’s a lot to love. These beloved dishes can come in all different shapes and sizes. Stuffing can be prepared from scratch, from a box, made of cornbread, cooked in the turkey or made from the side. But, is all stuffing good?
The Bad Kind of Stuffing
Though you can never go wrong with stuffing on Thanksgiving Day, you can go wrong with stuffing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Keyword stuffing is considered a black hat tactic, meaning it will penalize your firm’s site and negatively impact your SEO efforts.
Keyword stuffing is exactly as it sounds. It is when content is littered with a keyword or keywords you’d like that piece of content to rank for. Let’s say you want to write a blog on slip and fall claims at Walmart and you write:
“If you slip and fall at Walmart, you will want to talk to a slip and fall lawyer that has won slip and fall cases against Walmart. After your slip and fall at Walmart, you should contact a lawyer to help file the slip and fall claim against Walmart right away. With a lawyer’s help, you will have a better chance of winning your slip and fall case against Walmart”.
The repetition of a slip and fall at Walmart would be considered keyword stuffing. Posting content like this my result in your firm’s site being penalized and seeing a decrease in traffic, and subsequently potential leads.
How’d It Get To Be So Bad?
In February of 2011, Google released the Panda update. This update was meant to target “low quality” content. Sites that were optimizing using tactics like thin content (short, uninformative content), unoriginal or plagiarized content, pop-up ads and keyword stuffing were all targeted by this update. Those partaking in these black-hat tactics saw a dramatic drop in organic traffic post Panda, making it one of Google’s biggest updates.
How To Avoid the Bad Stuffing
Your keyword density, or how often your keywords appear in a piece of content, should be between 1-2% of your firm’s blog. For your 600-word blog, your keywords should appear 6-12 times within the blog. This includes the text in your meta descriptions, alt texts, or anywhere else you add text for the content. Over adding keywords here will still count towards your blog’s keyword density.
Do not add keywords and change the text color to the same background color as your firm’s site. Though a view cannot see them, when Google and other search engine’s crawl your site they will still see them.
To avoid any other potential penalties from Panda, keep your content unique and informative. If you have any duplicate content on your site, try redirecting traffic from one to the other. As you upload new content, add valuable links to other pages on your firm’s site a help boost the blog. Continuing to update old content and make sure the new content added follows the guidelines set forth by Panda.