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SEO Content Writing Tip for This Thanksgiving: Hold the (Keyword) Stuffing Please
Posted on November 24, 2014
There’s one kind stuffing that will do more harm than good on your SEO content writing: Keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing, a (strictly) black-hat practice of cramming as many SEO keywords onto a page as possible, has been a nuisance to many honest-to-goodness whitehat marketers everywhere. During the early days of search engines, cunning SEO ninjas were able to manipulate their SERP rankings with this technique. While it temporarily boosted rankings, it led to poor user experience. People got tired of finding pages with keywords like “hire web content writer” repeated over and over again. Eventually, Google and other search engines wised up and started filtering out websites with generous amounts of the same keywords (sneakily or blatantly) stuffed in web pages, and with no juicy content to bite into.
This season, it’s high time to move away from old practices and embrace newer and better techniques in driving more traffic to your website. One such technique is responsible keyword optimization. Remember that keywords are still an integral part of your SEO content. How else in the world will your target audience be able to find your content without keywords?
So how do you go about using keywords on your articles without spoiling your content turkey? Here are few ways:
- Remind yourself that you’re writing for people, not robots. Forget the spider bots. Remember that you’re creating content for those who will ACTUALLY be using it: your readers. So do create information-rich and relevant content your readers can easily digest.
- Spice things up with long tail keywords. Using longer and more specific keywords can give you a better chance of connecting with your target audience than sprinkling a generous amount of the same keywords all over your articles.
- Substitute, substitute, substitute. You don’t have to be like this guy:
“I eat Thesaurus for breakfast.” (Image taken from hdw.eweb4.com)
But it pays to widen your vocabulary and substitute keywords with synonyms. It won’t hurt your rankings. In fact, it might even help you get better rankings if your content has a variety of words related to your keywords. Why? Because (1) it shows that your website only produces high quality and valuable content, and (2) Google has an entire team to figure out that “cars” and “automobiles” mean the same thing. No, seriously. In fact, Google Webspam head Matt Cutts explains it all here.
By practicing responsible keyword optimization, you’re focusing more on what matters most: making people happy. By making people happy with your content, you are also making search engines happy…
And that’s how you do SEO content writing. Happy Thanksgiving!