by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media

Previously it was easier to achieve high search engine rankings by "gaming" the system with questionable SEO practices.  But as search engines have evolved, many of those practices have been rendered useless.  What is sad is that some people and SEO providers still endorse these outdated tactics.  Over the next five weeks we are going to look at five of the most common tactics and what the new alternative is.

Keyword Stuffing

In the late 90's, search engines were very unsophisticated.  The more frequently a keyword appeared in a page's content, the better it ranked.  This practice of "keyword stuffing" aw an easy way to manipulate search rankings.  Since then, search engines have gotten much smarter and refined their algorithms.

What to do instead:  Stuffing pages with keywords can now have a "negative" impact, as Google actively imposes penalties on gamed content.  So if you want your keywords to have the maximum impact, it is much better and much safer to use legitimate SEO practices such as:
  • Creating content for people/site visitors and not search engines
  • Make sure keywords are present in prominent part of your Web page such as headers, subheaders, title tags and meta descriptions
  • Structure your website so that important keyword pages are high up in the site architecture and easily found by both people and search engines.
Next week we are going to look at blog content.