As competition for the top spot on google search engines becomes more and more heated, companies are taking to keywords as a means to save the day and get ahead and it’s having adverse effects on their rankings. Don’t get me wrong, keywords are great, keywords are important, keywords are absolutely necessary, however there is such a thing as overkill. Use your keywords too often and google will not respond kindly as you are impeding on user experience, no one wants to read the same few words over and over again, it’s most likely not good for the readability of your articles and google knows exactly what you are doing.

When approaching keywords, here’s what you need to know:

1. Stick to a maximum keyword density (how many times the keyword appears, divided by the total number of words) of 2% any more than that and you’re in danger of keyword stuffing.
2. Each page on your website should have its own primary keyword, that is unique to that page.
3. Be selective with your content, don’t post for keywords sake, posting for SEO purposes only can be detrimental. SEO best practices do say 300 words per post is optimal however this is not the case if the content is shallow. Write as many words as you need to in order to cover your chosen topic fully or make your point.
4. Don’t publish duplicate or stolen copy.
5. Your keyword needs to be in your title, first and last paragraph, URL and meta description, you can stop there.

Most importantly, do your research. Find out what keywords your target audience are searching for, narrow it down, be specific and offer up high-quality content 100% of the time. Smart, engaging and informative copy should always be of the highest priority as this is what google really cares about. If you’re looking for help with how best to deploy your keywords or are in need of a total website refresh give us a call on (02) 8116 9033 and let’s see what we can do.