People who have been in the website industry for a while can remember back when everyone was stuffing as many keywords as possible into their web pages in order to rank for various phrases or words. It worked like a charm back then. But, it does not work anymore. Or, does it?
Back in the days when Yahoo was king of the search engines, webmasters were going nuts by stuffing all kinds of keyword phrases onto various web pages. Back then it was easier to manipulate the rankings. You could get ranked for a million different keyword phrases just by including a whole bunch of related or unrelated phrases on any given page.
The porn sites used this to their advantage. They would launch a bunch of pages with pornographic photos on them and then include phrases on the page that were unrelated. The pages would get ranked for these unrelated high traffic phrases. People would visit them only to find out that they were porn pages and not what they had expected.
These unscrupulous webmasters would stuff keywords in the Meta tags like crazy. They would also use color schemes to hide words that they buried on the page. They had gotten really creative in the ways that they could hide these obvious ranking manipulation techniques.
Search engines eventually smartened up though. They learned to filter out those types of pages because the vast majority of them provided low value content. Now it appears that all of the major search engines have various filters in place to stop people from trying to keyword stuff their pages. They have analyzed various quality pages to see what kind of keyword density a good page should have. Heck, even EzineArticles.com checks to make sure your keyword density is not too high. If it is over 2.5% they will not allow you to submit the article for publication.
A New Keyword Stuffing Technique Is Born
The newest form of keyword stuffing is being brought on by Google. Google has created a database index of synonyms. They have learned that certain words are related to certain other words and phrases. For instance, they know that Daytona 500 and Nascar both refer to the same type of thing; auto-racing. They know that the word driver can be used to describe a golf club depending on the other words around it. They know that Ping can be both a computer term as well as a brand of golf sporting goods.
As a result, they reward pages that have a number of different related keywords and synonyms on a page instead of pages that have the same keyword over and over again. If you doubt me, take a look for yourself. You will start noticing it.
In fact, the keyword synonym database is so important that you will see sites ranking for other words based on their content of synonyms as well as incoming links that use synonyms as anchors. The next time you are doing link analysis on your competition, pay attention to synonyms. It could be that one particular incoming link is way more valuable than you thought it was.
It makes perfect sense that they do this. Chances are if a page has a wider variety of related keywords it is much more likely to be honest high value content instead of content that was written specifically to manipulate search engine rankings. Yahoo, Google and Bing are getting smarter all the time. You had better start using this new method of keyword stuffing if you want to boost your on-page SEO scores.
The Right Way To Add More Keywords To Your Page
The right way to add more instances of the same keywords to your page is to simply add more useful content to that page. For instance, if the page you are trying to get ranked high is an article that is published on your website, then you could simply add another paragraph or two to the page that further explains whatever topic your article is talking about. Somewhere in that extra article or two, you could add in another instance of the primary keyword you want that page to rank highly for. You could also add in other relevant words and phrases which are ultimately going to lead to additional long tail traffic for that page.
