Are you feeling a little overzealous about your use of keywords? If you have the nagging worry that you just might have used your chosen keywords a few too many times on your webpage, chances are good that your probably you did.

But how too many is really too many when it comes to search engine optimization? Well, you’d probably be surprised. There are plenty of “thou shall nots” that webmasters seem to break constantly, simply because they don’t realize that keyword spamming is an actual penalty that will cause their site to get booted right out of the Google index. Here are some of the things you can check and do to ensure your on-page keywords don’t trip the spam filter and are working most effectively for your site’s optimization.

Do the Control-A test
Go onto your homepage and hit control-A. Do any words – particularly your chosen keywords – suddenly appear when you hit control-A? If so, this is not so good and is definitely against the Google webmaster guidelines. This is otherwise known as hidden text and is definitely a big enough crime that could result in your site vanishing completely for those chosen keywords, if it doesn’t disappear completely.

Teeny, tiny keywords
No, I am not talking about keywords that happen to be only a few letters in length. What I mean are additional keywords – sometimes hidden but sometimes visible – that are usually placed at the very bottom of the page, most often under the footer copyright information… and sometimes only seen after you hit page down multiple times after the copyright information. And these keywords are often placed in text so tiny that it is sometimes barely even visible. And yes, keywords just barely visible used in this fashion, such as very light gray on a white background, are still considered hidden keywords.

Those little hidden divs
Do you have some juicy keywords on the page that you think are artfully hidden away in carefully selected hidden divs? Think again. Notice the hidden part in the term hidden divs? You guessed it, these are considered hidden keywords too,

Does it pass the sniff test?
Read your copy to yourself out loud. Does it sound good as if you were speaking in real life or does it sound fake? Hint: if you say your chosen keyword combination more than two times in a sentence or more than four times in a paragraph, you could be stuffing keywords into the content. For more on testing this, see Have you gone overboard with your keyword density.

Overboard on the similar keywords?
While it is useful to have other similar keywords worked into your content, such as both cars and autos, be aware of how you use them. Written into the content in a discrete matter works, listing them all in a row does not. For more on doing this correctly, see Targeting keyword variations for increased search engine & pay per click traffic.

Are your titles too keywordlicious?
Putting keywords multiple times into your title tags is so 1990s. Visitors – and the search engines – don’t need to know your page is about Sony HDTVs three times in your title alone. Position it correctly in your title tag once, and once will be more than enough. And along the same lines, they engines don’t need to know your page is about Sony HDTVs twenty-three times in the description meta tag either.

Don’t forget about the ings
If your keyword is “ski” don’t forget to use plurals, tenses and the “ings”. So you would want to weave “skis” “skied” and “skiing” into your content where it fits appropriately. Otherwise, this mistake can cause you to miss out on a whole lot of additional traffic because someone is searching for a “skiing holiday” rather than a “ski holiday”. End result is you end up not ranking well (if at all) for the search term because you somehow forgot to include the keyword skiing anywhere on the page.

Image happy?
If your titles, keywords or other crucial text is in images, not only will it not count for your keyword density, but search engines won’t be able to read it either. But if you must, make sure you take advantage of using the image alt tags and name the image the same thing as what the image is. So if it is a picture of a product you are selling, the name of the image should be productname.jpg with alt=”Product Name” as the alt tag.

Us and ours?
Don’t use “us” “we” or “ours” when you can add crucial keywords seamlessly into the text. Instead of “our skills” say “our link building skills” or “our optimization skills”. Too few people take advantage of this technique, especially on service oriented websites.

Single or double or triple it up?
Not everyone searches for that crucial single keyword you are putting all your optimization efforts on. So ensure you are targeting a two or three word phrase instead, and consider it gravy to the single keyword phrase.

It is pretty easy to go overboard with keyword density, especially when using some of the less-than-quality keyword tricks to insert keywords where you think the search engines will give it a boost. And it is just as easy to miss golden opportunities because you didn’t take advantage of legitimate ways to beef up your density and include additional related keywords on the page. Unfortunately, when it comes to keywords, many of these tricks are well known and can easily trip today’s spam filters.

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Written on April 17, 2007 at 11:40 pm and filed under Keywords, Search Engine Optimization. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.