It’s Time to Stop Using Keyword Stuffing, Hidden Text, and Doorway Pages
Have you wondered why you aren’t getting more business from your website? Your website could be getting lots of visitors, but they might not be the right audience for your business and therefore aren’t contacting you. Or it could be because your business isn’t ranking well in search engine results.
Outdated SEO strategies could be part of the problem.
Here are three old school strategies that I see still used. If you’re doing any of the following, it’s time to make changes that will help with the quality of your website and help you get more business.
Keyword Stuffing
There was a time when Google used strings of keywords for rankings. By using this strategy, a page of a website that included lots of keywords and phrases could rank well for those keywords. Here’s an example of this:
We bake delicious chocolate chip cookies. Our chocolate chip cookies are made from scratch. If you’re thinking of buying chocolate chip cookies, please contact our chocolate chip cookie specialists at chocolate.chip.cookies@example.com.
If you’re not sure if you’ve used a keyword or phrase too often on a page of your website, read the text out loud to yourself. If it sounds unnatural or like you’re a stereotypical used car salesman, you’re keyword stuffing.
Instead, focus on creating content that will be useful for your visitors and ideal customers. In the example of chocolate chip cookies, you could tell the story of your cookie recipe and what makes it unique. Not only will that page be full of information-rich content, but your visitors will also be clicking to order them with their mouths watering.
Hidden Text
Hidden is often used as a way to include lots of keywords on pages to help with search engine rankings. However, using this practice now will at best not boost your rankings, and at worst, will get your site penalized.
An example is to have white text with a white background at the bottom of the page. People use this method to include keywords on the page. Since this text is not visible to the human visitors to your website, it’s a deceptive tactic as it’s there only for search engines.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages created for the purpose of ranking well for a specific search.
Let’s say you want to be found when someone searches for a chocolate chip cookie bakery in Ventura even though your bakery is located in Ojai. So you add a page to your site named “Ventura chocolate chip cookie bakery”, and the content of the page is the same as on your main chocolate chip cookie page with the addition of a sentence or two about Ventura.
Google discourages this because this page is not helpful to the visitor who wanted to find a bakery located in Ventura. And since the content of this page is mostly the same as the main chocolate chip cookie page, Google will also see this as duplicate content.
The better approach for enticing folks in Ventura to try your cookies is to include stories and reviews from customers in the Ventura area. That way, when they are in Ojai, they’ll be sure to stop into your bakery. Heck, they might even make a special trip just for your cookies!
For more tips on how to have high-quality content on your website, check out this post on Google’s Search Quality Guidelines.
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Do you have questions about search engine optimization? Would you like support for your website? Webb Weavers Consulting based in Ventura, CA can help! Contact Debbie to schedule an introductory call.