How not to use Keywords in the pages of your site

Every website has a common topic or goal.  From niche sites to corporate info, every site is geared toward a specific topic, or group of topics.   Using related keywords and using them in moderation will always prove more effective than stacking, stuffing or hiding.

One of the biggest mistakes is to overuse a keyword, or what’s called keyword stacking.  In the past, the idea was more keywords, better results.  Repeating the same keyword/s over and over with no intended purpose other than rank must be avoided.  Ultimately keyword stacking will cause a page to be downgraded or skipped entirely.  As we have all experienced, what use to work no longer does. 

Another keyword mistake is the use of unrelated keywords.  Placing popular keywords in your pages, that are completely unrelated, trying to draw traffic from search engines is bad news.  This will cause pages and even entire sites to be removed from SERPs.

Similar to stacking, keyword stuffing refers to the use of keywords in the alt= image description.  Using the alt= to explain your graphics is great, however, stuffing these tags with unrelated keywords is bad.  Again, be descriptive and relevant, using tags correctly is always good practice.

Hidden and Tiny text aimed to artificially increase saturation is also a very poor practice.  Those of us that have been around for any length of time, have all used the font tag to hide our keyword rich text at the bottom of a page.  Well, at least I admit to having done it on several occasions. 

Having been around the net for 14 years, I have seen each of these practices go from effective to taboo.  As the search engines get smarter we’re forced to change the approach we take to get good ranking on every page of every site.