This is a guest post by Stacey, of UK Digital Marketing Agency, Tecmark: SEO London.

As someone who works in SEO on a daily basis, I like to think I can spot techniques and/or content applied to a website specifically for that purpose. But in actual fact, it really shouldn’t ever be all that obvious because pages are supposed to be, as Google’s guidelines tell us, designed for human users primarily. This means that meta title, description and other page elements you include for search engines, should not be “stick out off the page obvious,” but should actually look as though they are there for a reason!

This “SEO techniques” I’m about to name and shame is not something I would actually consider to be SEO at all…. just spam! But it’s often the case that this technique is applied because a misguided webmaster believes this will assist in enhancing his search engine rankings. My biggest pet peeve is this one…

Keyword Stuffed Content

Repeating your main keyword 15 times in a 200 word paragraph makes it sound stupid. And, if you ask me, the “keyword density rule,” is a complete myth! Yes, your keyword should be included in your text where possible – but not at the expense of content that reads naturally and fluently. There’s a big difference between keyword rich content and keyword stuffed content. Read what you write out loud. If it sounds unnatural, don’t publish it on your site.

Keyword stuffing is spammy and unpleasant for the readers of your site. So when you consider that Google wants to present its search engine users with the best quality and most relevant websites for their searches, do you really think that keyword spamming your page is the way to go?

So how do you get the balance right?

• Identify your keyword(s) before you start writing.
• Write the content naturally, as if you were not writing with search engines in mind.
• Read the content out loud and ask yourself whether it reads naturally.
• Check to ensure your keyword is included, preferably more than once though don’t get too caught up and concerned with the number of times it occurs.
• If the word isn’t included, work it in.
• Reread again and if it still reads naturally, post it!