In the early days of SEO, a common practice to get your site to rank high on search engines was to put words related to searches absolutely everywhere in your site. This practice is called Keyword Stuffing. While this tactic used to be beneficial, it is now both ineffective but also frowned upon by search engines.
Early web crawlers such as Google and Yahoo! often looked at how many times keywords appeared in sites, and chose what appeared first in their results based upon this. When site administrators learned this, they would abuse this mechanic of web crawlers to cheat their site to the top listings. Admins would often formulate site content to appear like this: “Looking for Botox in Dallas? Our Dallas Botox clinic offers the best Dallas Botox injections in all of Dallas.” While this worked well for the crawler, it led to awful user experiences which caused many to avoid the website entirely.
Eventually, Google and other search engines caught on to this and put in measures to prevent keyword stuffing. Modern search engines operate on user experience in addition to keywords for high rankings. If Google detects that people visit and then immediately leave your site, they assume that it is not well designed and some shady maneuvers were made to make it rank high.
As a final blow, many search engines like Google and Yahoo! actually made keyword stuffing against the TOS of their webmaster guidelines. If they catch you keyword stuffing, they reserve the right to de-list your site or penalize you in other ways. That can’t look good on your brand’s image!
In summary, keywords are very important to site development, however overusing your keywords to ‘cheat’ your way to the top is frowned upon by many, and in modern times doesn’t really work.
~ Rob
Source: https://www.jcidm.com/why-keyword-stuffing-no-longer-works-and-what-to-do-instead/
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