You may have heard of the term “keyword stuffing.”  The term means essentially what it sounds like — trying to fool the search engines by cramming keywords into a page’s content — and can actually earn you a worse search engine ranking, rather than a better one.

When you optimize your website for the search engines, your best bet is to highlight just a couple of keyword phrases on each page, and write the content around those.  SEO best practices include:

• Putting your primary keyword in the meta title, page headings, and a couple of the subheadings if you use them
• Using your primary and secondary keywords a couple of times in the first paragraph, or the first 150 words
• Sprinkling the keywords throughout the rest of the content, but not too often — no more than perhaps once or twice in every paragraph

The overall goal is for the keywords to attract the search engines, yet read as naturally as possible, so that you don’t get flagged for trying to manipulate the search engines.  Doing so can get you into all kinds of trouble.  You may even upset your FTP hosting provider — check your terms of service to see if there is anything about it in there!

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