Here’s a question for you: What are the most important words on your web site? Do I hear you shout, “ keywords of course.” Well if you did, you’d be wrong.

Forget your keywords for a moment because what you should have said is “you” and “your”.

Over the years web surfers have endured many unpleasant trends – flash and animation, blinking text, pop-up windows, purple text on black backgrounds and much, much more. These days, however, they’re subjected to the subtle, yet still unpleasant practice of “let’s stuff as many keywords into our web page copy as we possibly can” syndrome.

Known as “keyword stuffing” this practice stems from the notion that if you place a huge amount of keyword phrases on your web page you’ll miraculously be elevated to the top of the search engine results and sell more of your product or service. Of course, from the visitors’ point of view this doesn’t work too well because repeating the same phrases over and over again on the page won’t persuade your visitors to do anything much except hastily leave the site.

So sneakily, just to make sure the repetitive, parrot-like copy doesn’t cause a complete exodus of potential customers, some web site owners and developers hide their keyword phrases so the search engines can see them, but human visitors can’t.

I idea is this: place your keywords in the same color as your background and make them invisible to the human eye, but not to the search engines. The search engines, reading the text, index the site as relevant for that particular keyword phrase and rank it higher in the results. Problem is, not only is it unethical, it doesn’t actually work. Well not for long anyway.

Unfortunately, this practice seems to be proliferating like locusts. And while it’s impossible to spray or swat them, I can draw your attention to it in the hope that, (a) you’ll refrain from using this tactic on your own web site, and (b) I’ll shame the offenders into removing the offending words from their site.

Leading the pack in the keyword-stuffing department is an unlikely pair: churches and lawyers. Yes, you heard me right, but it bears repeating: churches and lawyers. Why that is I can only imagine, but just in case you don’t believe me, I’ve put together a kind of rogue’s gallery… well two actually because finding them is a time-consuming process that involves typing the same word a lot. Please note that to see the keywords you’ll have to hold down the “ctrl” and “A” key on your keypad. Please also note that the owners of the web site may be unaware this practice has been used on their site.

1.The US-Attorney & The Law Office: http://www.the-office.com/lawofc/. Keyword = lawyer. Hold down ctrl and A and scroll right down to the bottom of the page.
2.The First Baptist Church: http://www.lakeshorebaptist.net/hycws/. Keyword = church. There they are right down at the bottom of the page next to you know who.

Just a tad sneaky, don’t you think?

While I understand very well that web site owners want to elevate their site to the top of the natural search results, I sometimes wonder if they ever think about how their site got to that top position? And, if they ever think that if they create their site with their visitor’s tastes, needs and desires in mind, they’ll achieve more success in the long run? Perhaps not.

But what they should think about is this: if the search engines discover this trickery they’re at liberty to remove the site from their index. And no amount of begging, pleading or bribery will get the site reinstated until the search engines say so. It’s got to be much safer to stick with straightforward, persuasive, you-oriented, visible copy, written for your visitors, and not just for the search engines.

Just in case you’re tempted, or you think your web developer might be, here’s a snippet from Google’s guidelines.

Quality Guidelines - Basic principles:
•Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users.
•Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
•Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
•Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:
•Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
•Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
•Don't send automated queries to Google.
•Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
•Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
•Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Follow them. Your business will profit in the long run.

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