Are You a Habitual Keyword Stuffer?

Jun 9, 2009 Posted by Judith in Musings, SEO | SEM

Use Your Tags Wisely While some cannot remember what life was like BI (before Internet), one would think we’ve progressed in the area of how to properly use the title, meta and image alt tags within our sites. But nooooooooooooooo, instead we are still back in the 1990s when it comes to understanding the important tags that can help with our SEO efforts.

The tags haven’t changed. Same tags. Their importance and relevancy may have declined or increased depending on which tag you are talking about. But the tags are the tags and one thing is clear — site owners were never served well by stuffing them with every possibility under the sun.

Several times each and week I am asked to add lists of keywords to the “meta” tags. Then add to that the impression that the image alt tag is also prime real estate for keyword stuffing and we have quite a few onliners who believe stuffing is the path to SEO nirvana.

Why would someone want to be a stuffer? To get every possible keyword in the page/code so that they can rank on the top page of Google of course!

When posed with a request of this nature I put things into perspective like this. I ask the inquirer to imagine if it really were as easy as simply being able to stuff keywords into tags just to get top page rankings.

Nothing else matters — just stuff it! On page content doesn’t matter, inbound links don’t matter, the title and description tags being carefully crafted to be unique for each and every page — foe-ged-aboud-it — waste of time. Just stuff it!

If it were that easy, everyone would just be stuffing and everyone would have top page rankings.

And, that’s exactly why the meta keyword tag in particular is ignored by search engines. It isn’t an indicator of anything other than what the site owner may want to rank by regardless of all the other criteria to the contrary.

What you put in meta keyword tag is not necessarily the most focused set of keyword phrases for a particular page nor is it necessarily indicative of the page’s true content. So search engines look at a combo of criteria to get a consensus of what a page is about and what it should be ranking for with the meta keyword tag being a minuscule portion of that determination.

Then I’m told — yes told just this morning as a matter of fact — that some guru/friend/geek said you can boost your rankings by stuffing your keywords in the alt portion of the image tag. Really? The image tag has an “alt” for you to describe what the image displays. Yes the image may be described coincidentally using some relevant keywords but this tag is not for what you want to rank well for in search engines!

The key is to use tags for what they are intended and to do so wisely and with discretion. If you are stuffing tags with every variation under the sun, that tells me you haven’t done your due diligence to know what your target market is in fact searching for.

And, if that is the case, that means your site isn’t focused or targeted either and you don’t deserve top page rankings on any search engine. Time for you to climb out of the way-back machine and get to work:

At your service,
Judith