SEO mistakes beginners make when writing SEO content for SEO

The title of this post should be a dead giveaway as to the subject matter.  The biggest mistake many people who are new to search engine optimization make is to overuse the keywords that they are targeting.  They pack their keyword combinations so heavily into their content that the content itself is barely readable or at worst, completely useless. This practice is called keyword stuffing, and is not only useless for the human reader who will hopefully end up at your highly optimized page, but is considered an unethical practice by the SEO community as a whole.

While it seems logical to use your keywords as often as possible in your content, there comes a point where enough-is-enough.  Past this certain point the content suffers, as is obvious in the title of this article which I intentionally stuffed to make a point. (And if it ranks well for the term SEO, I’ll fall over laughing.)  The title should have read;

The most common mistakes beginning SEO writers make

But because I wanted the term SEO to show up multiple times in the title of the post itself, I had to butcher the title and very nearly destroyed readability in the process. This is true in the case of a post or article in which the writer strives to add his or her keyword to the text at any point possible.  The end result is gibberish.

Consider the following piece of text:

Barbados vacations are the ultimate in all inclusive vacations, with very private Caribbean vacation rentals paired with your choice of island activities. The beauty of this tropical paradise, the luxury and charm of the island, and the friendly people waiting for you, make luxury Caribbean holidays in Barbados a truly enjoyable experience one to be repeated over and over again, as many of our guests do!

Notice a theme? this paragraph is so stuffed with keyword rich text that it becomes difficult to follow and from a grammatical standpoint, nearly comical.  If they had just written a few more paragraphs and made sure that the overall topic of their content was vacation related this would not have happened.

Better yet would have been if the writer had dedicated a single page to only vacations in Barbados and not tried to milk keyword space for other packages into one single article.  It’s far simpler to optimize a page for search results if you are laser-targeting one single keyword.  All that has to be done at that point is to write about it and keywords that relate to your exact subject.  With just a tiny bit of effort you will have a post or page that naturally includes the keywords you’re targeting, but without making your readers suffer through a ton of pure babble before deciding to go somewhere else. (And they will.)

The last and probably most compelling argument against keyword stuffing is that the search engine gods absolutely despise the practice. If caught you might just find your PageRank for that particular article drop to zero in the blink of an eye.  At that point you have not only lost all the hard work that you’ve put into overloading your test with keywords, but now you’ll have to go back and rewrite it properly anyway.

Forget Keyword Stuffing.  It’s bad for your rankings, bad for your readers and a complete waste of your time and effort.

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