Monday Copywriting Tip #54: It’s Not About Keyword Stuffing
This is a topic that has been covered by many people, but it seems the message about keyword stuffing still hasn’t reached everyone.
One of the mistakes I keep hearing about is when people stuff their web pages with one or two keywords as often as possible.
There is still a widespread belief that optimizing for the search engines involves including your best keyword as often as you possibly can.
Not so.
Two things happen to you when you try to repeat your keyword as often as possible on a web page.
First, the search engines convulse into digital laughter and wonder who on earth you think you are trying to fool.
Two, your readers scratch their heads and wonder why your page is so badly written.
The bottom line is, stuffing your page with keywords simply doesn’t work.
Here’s what I do.
I confine each page to a single topic. I include my keyword in the page title, meta tags, headline, one subhead and within the body text once or twice. With a short page, you should probably do less than that, with a long page you can do a little more.
But here’s the heart of it. When you include keywords, do it to help your readers...to signal to them the core topic of the page.
Always write for your readers.
When you do that, the search engines will recognize the value of the page and reward you accordingly.
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