The Subtle Danger of Keywords

We've all seen it. A beautiful, interactive and exciting webpage full of flashing banners, videos and loaded with content. Yet every page seems to have the same little phrase screaming at us every 13 seconds.

It's annoying. It's distracting. It's abuse of the language. It's an insult to the viewer's intelligence. It's keyword stuffing.

In the early days of search engines, the spiders were on the look out for certain words or phrases that matched the information being queried through the search bar. This is how the search engine determined if a webpage would have the information the searcher was looking for.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for aggressive marketers to start manipulating popular queries to give their pages a higher ranking on the coveted results list. A consumer seeking hypoallergenic cat litter could very well land on a page selling cat-woman lingerie, simply because hypoallergenic cat litter was the current hot keyword phrase.

Many methods have been used to overwhelm a webpage with popular terms. Text and background spaces of the same colour; cleverly hiding a phrase from the viewer, but not the spider. Tags, content, titles, photographs, videos and backgrounds; all heavily flaunting a popular search term in a race to make it to the top of the results page. 

It became vicious. It became dirty. It became expensive. And for the average consumer, who really wanted to find a cat litter that wouldn't cause an asthma attack or skin rash, it became a disappointment. 

When search engines were sending back results that were filled with the same content, the same blaring linguistic abuse, and often a full list of results that all pointed to the same webpage, the complaint lines started to light up as well. The searching public spoke their disapproval. And the giants of the search engines listened.

As marketers and content farms grew, eating up the hot phrases and causing extremely low quality search results, the engine giants were hard a work developing more intuitive formulas to index web sites. As a result, the misuse and obvious stuffing of keywords became flagged for what it is: spam.

The spiders were given new brains. Now, in order to rank in search listings, the subject in question must be relevant to the rest of the page. To determine this, the spiders have, in principle, learned how to read. Rather than crawling over pages picking up the most commonly repeated phrase or word, the spiders now look for related terms and phrases as well.

The thing about the big companies that run search engines is this: they don't like to be duped. These days, overusing popular search terms will more than likely downgrade a ranking in search engines. A victory for consumers as well as honest businesses and marketers.

How to Avoid Keyword Abuse:

Keywords and phrases are still important, but there is no need to centre an entire campaign around a single word or phrase. In fact, if we've learned nothing from the smarter spiders, we know that ultimately the way pages are indexed comes from the demands of the consumer.  

Visitors. Browsers. Surfers. People. Humans.

So, rule number one: Build your page for your intended audience. Quality and substance is now, and always will be, the best way to build loyal traffic and increase sales. Give the public what they want, and they will remember you. They will come back again and again. And, they will bring their friends.

Rule number two: Proofread everything. If a word seems to be jumping out at you, dig out your thesaurus (or click on it), to find an alternative phrase. Take advantage of LSI phrasing (latent semantic indexing), which is really a fancy term for related items and phrases. These will occur naturally within your webpage without thought or planning, so it's a good angle to follow to expand your related topics.

And finally, rule number three: Before you add any new material, videos, graphs or tags, repeat this phrase, "I will not overstuff keywords, I will not overstuff keywords, I will not overstuff keywords." Once you train yourself to appeal to your audience and not the spiders, the rest will take care of itself.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/article-marketing-articles/the-subtle-danger-of-keywords-5672917.html

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