Every few months I’ll have a client ask me about a ‘sure fire’ SEO activity that they heard about. There are two in particular that I’ve heard of several times—keyword stuffing and resubmitting your site to search engines repeatedly.
A few clients have asked me whether or not it’s a good idea to place a paragraph or two at the end of their pages that is full of good keywords for their site. My reply is simple.
“It’s not a bad idea…it’s a TERRIBLE idea.”
Search engines are very complex computer-based algorithms that can spot trickery from a cyber mile away. Use keywords gingerly throughout the page. Keep the copy reading like a normal conversation you’re having with a friend or co-worker. Talking to a friend in keyword-stuffing-like language will likely leave them confused and frazzled. Therefore having copy on your site in a keyword-stuffing-like language will lead many of the major search engines to knock you down in their rankings. What’s more, they may just kick you out all together.
The second SEO activity that I’ve heard some clients asking about is resubmitting their site to the search engines throughout the year. While there may have been a time in SEO evolution when this technique worked, today there is no known evidence that it really does anything. Submitting your site when you first design it and then again when you make major changes is all you really need to do. If you need the peace of mind, submit the site once a year. The reason many companies will tell you to continually resubmit your site is twofold—so search engines don’t forget about your site in particular, and that you get listed in all of the different databases they have.
Think about it. Take Google for example. Their computer system is the second largest, most complex system in the world, second only to the United States Department of Defense. They aren’t going to forget about your site, especially if you’re working to keep your site current and relevant by using things such as the Website Marketing Hat Trick and other SEO activities such as an AdWords account.
There are countless things to do that are legitimate SEO activities that will not get you in any trouble with search engines. If you’d like to learn about more of these activities, get in touch with us. We’ll sit down and discuss different SEO activities that will help improve your ranking.
Next week we’ll follow up with some ideas that can be utilized that follow the White Hat techniques that search engines do like to see.