Posted by: Bob Bly
July 7, 2009
Issue #709

Can you have too many keywords
on your Web site?

I recently read an article in a marketing magazine that advised repeating keywords on your site as often as possible, and in multiple places, so search engine “spiders” can find them.

But my friend and fellow copywriter Nick Usborne says that this advice is not only wrong, but actually harmful.

“This is the worst possible advice you can give to anyone about optimizing their site for the search engines,” says Nick. 

“It’s an element of what is referred to as ‘keyword stuffing’ and is either ignored by the search engine algorithms or, in bad cases, your page and site will be penalized. Worse still, it results in pages that read very strangely to human visitors.

“Using keywords too often on a page and in the meta tags is worse than not using them at all. The frequency or overuse of keywords on a page has nothing to do with whether a spider will find the page. And if a spider finds the page, it doesn’t need a keyword repeated frequently in order to find it.”

Since I am not an SEO expert, I asked a number of consultants in this area – and others more knowledgeable than I — to comment on the topic of keyword usage on Web sites.

“I think stuffing keywords on a Web page is taking the focus off where it needs to be to be successful in any business,” says Sean Woodruff. “That focus should be trained squarely on the customer. Stuffing keywords is a gimmick that is focused on tricking the search engines.”

“Yes, search engines are important,” says Susan Getgood. “But it is far more important to have a good Web site that sells effectively. We should focus on writing good copy that effectively communicates the offer.

“I expect that keywords appear an appropriate amount in good selling copy vs. some artificial stuffing exercise which doesn’t fool the search engines and likely damages your overall communications effort.

“Remember, people do land on your Web site from other sources – advertising, direct mail, and so on — not just from search engines. It is silly to try to optimize for one source, if in doing so, you end up with a sub-optimal Web site for all the others.”

“I often furrowed my brow at suggestions of altering copy to optimize search engine results,” says Bruce DeBoer. “It wasn’t so much that I knew my way was better, but rather that I couldn’t imagine altering otherwise great copy to satisfy a search engine.”

Apryl Parcher advises, “When writing Web sites, it’s more important to put keywords in meta tags and descriptions that are only used by spiders, and not seen by the average person reading your page, and also to give your pages titles in HTML that truly reflect the page’s contents.

“While it is true that words are picked up on your home page for the search engine description — unless the text block is made into an image — it’s usually the first 20 words or so. So make sure that text is what you want people to see when they pick you up on Google. However, you can go all out in putting appropriate search keywords in your description tags without stuffing your actual copy with them.”

“Never stuff a Web page with keywords; it’s awful advice,” says Paul Woodhouse. “You make sure they’re in your title and your meta data. Place them carefully in the beginning, middle, and end of your spiel — and in the H1, H2 tags if necessary.

“Anymore than that and you risk being penalized by Google — although you can find many a site getting away with it. Also, it simply reads awfully. But, don’t take my word for it. Go to www.seochat.com for expert advice.”

“If you want to attract search engine spiders and repel your human visitors, then by all means, stuff away,” says Andrea Harris. “Good Web writing is a balance between satisfying the spiders and the humans. But it’s the humans who buy your products and services.”

“It’s not about ’stuffing’ copy with keywords,” says Richard Leader. “It’s about making sure the keywords are in there.

“Some years back, I ran an online training company. Our course outlines were quite clearly course outlines to a human reader — but not to a spider. We realized we didn’t once use the phrase ‘HTML training course,’ for example.

“So we added it in a few times — and yeah, it looked a bit clunky. But with just a couple of mentions (for example, ‘In this HTML training course, you will learn …’), we increased our search engine traffic — and our conversions. So, my advice is not to stuff but to ‘strategically place.’”

“Placing keywords within your site is certainly an important part of getting search engines to notice you,” says Joel Heffner. “However, my current favorite way to appeal to search engines is to ping entries that I make to my blogs.

“Search engines appear to love to run to see what’s been added to a blog. If you create a link to a specific page, the search engine will take note of that page as well.”

Robert W. Bly
Guest Contributor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE™

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8 Comments »

1. Comment by David G. — July 7, 2009 @ 11:54 am

   I agree with your sources, Bob. The goal of any website should be CONVERSIONS, not just TRAFFIC. Keyword stuffing may bring some traffic, but the visitors will likely get disappointed by the content if it reads awkwardly, resulting in few conversions.

   I recently reviewed some Google Analytics statistics for a website that was getting thousands of visitors each day from an ad campaign - but their “bounce rate” (the percentage of visitors leaving the site without going any further) was 98% and the average time spent on the landing page was less than 30 seconds!! Not exactly a “targeted message” to the “target market”!

2. Comment by Michelle - Reviyve — July 7, 2009 @ 12:35 pm

   I really appreciate this article because I get so much advice (some unsolicited) about keywords. For example, one source tells me to see what my competitor is using and just that keyword one more time than they do. However, if that’s the case, after a while sites will always be one upping each on a keyword.

   I do have a question though. How many is too many various keywords to focus on a site? For example, I sell dead sea and natural skin care products. Could I focous on a keyword for both of those or would that be too much per page?

   Thanks

3. Comment by Paul Flood — July 7, 2009 @ 2:05 pm

   Great article Robert. Stuffing keywords is not typically a great strategy. If you have to alter the copy too much as a search engine strategy, you’re starting from a pretty weak position. It’s still about providing useful content for a visitor.

   Instead of trying to “trick” the search engines with short-lived tactics, it’s an easier and more effective strategy to understand what they want, which is good content, and then provide it.

   Too often, it seems that people only focus on the primary keyword and fail to take advantage of the long-tail keywords that may bring less, but highly targeted traffic. The result is that their pages are repetitive and boring.

   A good exercise is to use a tool like keyword density http://www.keyworddensity.com, and put in your keywords. It will essentially tell you what the search engines think your site is about. If the answer is different than what you want your site to be about, you need to make some changes.

4. Comment by Ghazal Alvi — July 7, 2009 @ 2:13 pm

   Great article Bob!

   @David - I agree with you.

   @Michelle - Try to optimize for one keyword/page for better results.

   If you’ve to repeat a keyword more often, then try to use synonyms or its variation, but not the actual keyword repeatedly.

5. Comment by Dan Schulz — July 7, 2009 @ 2:15 pm

   Michelle (Bob, I hope you don’t mind me trying to answer her question for you), the best thing to do with the keywords is to write naturally and don’t worry too much about how often you use a keyword per page. Just make sure that your content is easily read by people while ensuring that the keywords you do use are placed strategically on the page (in your headings and near the top of your page copy, as Bob suggested; don’t forget your page titles as well, which are by far the most important on-page ranking factor the search engines use these days).

   Now, if you’re going to conduct your own research into keywords, you’re going to quickly hear about things like “keyword density” and “SEO copywriting”. Don’t worry about them, and just focus on writing for your visitors. Two wonderful articles that explain this are “The Keyword Density of Nonsense” by Dr. E. Garcia and “Why Writing for Spiders Is the Least Sticky Strategy of All” by Alan Johnson for Copyblogger.com (the links below are provided for reference purposes only - I have no affiliation with either site, its owners or the authors of the content on those sites).

   http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Mar05/garcia.html
   http://www.copyblogger.com/writing-for-seo

   To answer your second question, yes you can target multiple keywords on a Web page. I typically go for 2-3 keywords per page as long as those keywords are directly related to each other (such as “digital photography news and reviews” or “authentic womens’ designer handbags and purses” for example).

   Using your own Web site’s home page as an example (assuming the site linked to in your comment is yours; my apologies if it’s not), I’d probably target the keywords “Natural Dead Sea Cosmetics and Skin Care Products” in your page title (note the keywords “dead sea cosmetics” “dead sea skin” “dead sea skin care” “dead sea products” “dead sea skin products” “skin care products” and so forth are in the example home page title).

   For your interior and product pages, I’d use the keywords that provide the most targeted traffic that are associated with those products. I don’t want to give away too much in a public venue (since I don’t want to give your competitors free intel); would you mind if I contacted you via your Web site with a 100% completely free list of keywords to target? (If you’re wondering, I’m a Community Advisor for SitePoint.com and a SEO.com forum administrator.)

6. Comment by Clarke Echols (Resident scientist and rabble-rouser) — July 7, 2009 @ 5:44 pm

   It’s been an interesting day.

   I took Bob’s suggestion and went to SEOchat.com to poke around a bit. I got off on a tangent discussing no-nos in SEO black-hat techniques when they mentioned the evils of “invisible text”. That brought back a memory from a few weeks ago.

   Earlier this year, I stopped by a local business to congratulate the owner on a particularly effective direct-mail postcard I had just received, thinking it an opportunity to perhaps get a web-development project from him, based on what I’d observed on his then-current site.

   He told me he had another web designer working on the site and it would be up in a few weeks.

   Recently, I looked, and found his new “improved” site that looked OK, but needed more work on the copy. I saved the page to disk on my computer, then started playing with the copy.

   But I encountered something strange: An -level head in his masthead across the top that was invisible. Investigation showed the CSS set the color for the text to be the same as the background color, rendering it invisible to human eyes, but very visible to the spiders. I was thinking it a slick way to fool a search engine.

   But today, when reading of the perils of such “tricks”, I went to Google and searched for his site. He shows up NOWHERE on Google, though he does appear on Yahoo!’s organic listing at #1 when I search for the name.

   His site has been banned, and it appears to be his “web designer’s” fault. I stopped by this afternoon to break the bad news and left a message with his office aid who’s a good friend I’ve known for years, asking him to tell the owner to call me ASAP about the problem.

   Now for the pain of fixing the problem and getting the ban lifted by Google.

   When will these people figure out that honesty and quality content pay in the search-engine game?

   And it’s the client who gets hurt by this stuff.

   Clarke

7. Comment by Oritseyemi — July 7, 2009 @ 7:33 pm

   It hurt the search engine?

   Check this out

   Harvard Publication used negotiation on their landing page 36 times.

   If you google negotiation, it brings up http://www.pon.harvard.edu/ as number 6.

   google copywriting now . this site http://www.copyblogger.com/copywriting-101/ will pop up as number 2.

   They used it 14 times.

   I can go on and on.

   I know there are many other factors that are considered in coming up on google’s first page for certain keywords or phrases.[we don't want to go into details here!]

   In my own humble opinion, as long as it makes sense to the reader, go ahead and use it.

   What else can I say?

8. Pingback by Skindemo.free.fr » Archive du blog » Can you have too many keywords on your Web site? | The Total Package — July 7, 2009 @ 11:43 pm

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