Keyword Stuffing: Phone Numbers back lashed by Google

Considering what’s new and hot in SEO, there is a lot to look at. New and hot news in SEO?, certainly but if we are about to talk about breaking the bearers, forget it. The good old days, when the SEOs promised top search engine ranking with the blink of an eye, are no more. No more you can buy links and create authority. Google is watching your every move. We are hearing about frequent unannounced Penguin updates. Watch out, you would only come to know about it when your links disappear from the search engine scene.

To remain within the scene of the search engine search results, do what the search giant tells you to do. Don’t budge an inch. Act smart and find yourself in the deep manhole you dig for yourself.

SEOs have tried to and have succeeded in getting top ranking by playing with the phone numbers. Stuffing numbers got them to the top. People talked about it and many did complain about getting no news worthy stuff. Matt Cutts said that Google received complaints and hence, the numbers stuffed on a web page, actually not giving out any valuable information would be considered spam and could be taken off. “Pages with the list of phone numbers add little or no value” is the call.

The news now is – get straight up with your content. Give quality, be natural. Do use keywords but make sure you do not over use these. Using variations intelligently to craft a meaningful text, readable and understandable by the web visitors will do the job for you.

What to do next in SEO – Have gone through Keyword Research

Keyword research is a complex area of SEO. If anyone thinks it is easy, he can take a walk. Perceptions have no place in the keyword research. If you think that you know the right keywords without checking them out, you are wrong. You need to go through the process. Our customers think differently, you would too think differently if you go out to buy something. Similarly our perceptions deceive us. We need to make a thorough research. I have been there. I have done what you might think of doing and believe me; you will find yourself in a mess.

Get ready for trip. Once we have selected the keywords and the search terms to optimize our website, we must first check these search terms for the current competition level.

We move ahead to build Meta Tags. The HTML tags that still have a say in the SEO and now out of three important Meta Tags, just two have maintain their important position in the On-Page SEO. Yup, I am talking about the Meta Title Tag and the Meta Description Tag. Keyword tag has lost its place, though you can use Meta keyword tag too, during the On-Page Optimization, if it is not useful, it will not harm your SEO process.

Meta Title Tag, my tutor told me that this is the heart of the On-Page SEO. This tag is displayed by the search engine in the search results and is the first line, hyper-linked to the relevant web page. This is the link that the web user clicks, if he finds it interesting. So build you Meta title tag correctly and make it interesting. Make it relevant to the users query and do not, he DO NOT stuff keywords. Use keywords in the Meta Title Tag but do it intelligently.

“Make is interesting. Do it for the search engines, but do it for your web visitors too. If the web visitors find it uninteresting, you will not get the needed visitors”, he had said.

I am practicing to make powerful title tags. You must too, redesign your title tags and make them as is being preached by my tutor.

5 SEO mistakes that we must avoid

SEO today has gone fragile. We could have given little thought to the nitty-gritty’s earlier but as time passed the search engine pulled the plugs, thanks to our own action where we had forced the stringent changes and enhancements. Yet many of us make mistakes and land ourselves in hot waters. To err is human, but some of us purposely do things that lead to penalties later.

Let’s see, what not to do. 5 mistakes that people usually make in SEO are outlined below:

Creating websites with frames and flash – The search engines do not recognize the flash. It passes away. While we attempt to make our web visitors happy with animations and flash intros, we forget that we are harming our SEO efforts. We know that the search engine read text and index the same, than, let’s not spend time and money on efforts that can do harm to the website SEO.

Pushing too hard on keywords and keyword phrases – We must understand the thin lined difference between the keyword usage and keyword stuffing. The required or we can say that the appropriate density today stands around 1%. If you are doing more than that, you will be in trouble. Forget the 3% to 4% keyword density.

Use Hidden Text – Do not make such a mistake. Any black hat technique will get you no where. Your SEO efforts would bounce back as soon as it is detected. Some SEO’s might tell you to use hidden text to get top search engine ranking, but they might not tell you that search engines have got smarter and can detect hidden text. If you want to get your site banned on the search engine, you can follow through.

Buying Links – Great, if you have already done this, be ready for the out lash by the search engine. This is a big NO NO. The trend of links is foreseeable, the search engine can make out whether you have gathered links naturally or you have brought these links from link farm. Many incoming links and those too from not so relevant sites, creates the buzz on the search engine’s platform.

Using copied content – Surely coping content from your competitions website is the easiest way out. Many of our friends used to prefer copying the text. It used to save “hell lot of time”. Good haa, bad for the search engine. Your content would not be ranked no matter how hard you try.

Keyword Stuffing – The death trap for websites

We have come a long way since keyword stuffing become illegal. Yet, many optimizers are in the habit of pushing too hard to the top search engine ranking. The optimizers, the old school of through people, or those who have based their SEO strategies on black hat SEO practices don’t seem to come off, from their illicit practices of stuffing keywords in the web page content, Meta title and Meta description tags and so on. The effort of extracting juice through over optimization does not seem to be working anymore. Not with the Google for sure and also not with other search engines.

Webopedia defines keyword stuffing as, “A SEO technique used by Web designers to overload keywords onto a Web page so that search engines will read the page as being relevant in a Web search. Because search engines scan Web pages for the words that are entered into the search criteria by the user, the more times a keyword appears on the Web page the more relevancy the search engine will assign to the page in the search results (this is only one way that search engines determine relevancy, however.) Search engines often penalize a site if the engine discovers keyword stuffing, as this practice is considered poor netiquette, and some search engines will even ban the offending Web pages from their search results.”

About.com defines keyword stuffing as, “Keyword stuffing is a deceptive technique to try and elevate a website's search engine result ranking by including targeted keywords more often than they naturally would appear in a quality document. The intent is to make it so that it's it is unlikely to be seen by a visitor but will be visible to search engines.”

In every well defined line of keyword stuffing we can conclude that keyword stuffing can get your website dumped by the search engines and make you loose your authority on the web. The website or the web business suffers due to:

• The text become meaningless for the website visitors due to the over use or repeated use of the relevant keywords. As the text seems more robotic it chases the humans away and less conversions happen, in spite of the fact the site had attained top search engine ranking
• The Website gets penalized. It is delisted or banned from the search engine in due course of time; hence the short lived life brings no laurels to website owners.