Your website has been running for nearly a year now and it’s a bit unfortunate that the traffic is still trickling in at a snail pace. Your PageRank value remains at zero and you are barely able to cover the monthly bill for web hosting and other expenses. When you’re about to give up hope, someone comes and asks you to get top ten rank in no time with seemingly little effort. However, it could possibly be too good to be true. It is important for you to be aware of common illegal acts that can be performed to boost your rank at least for a while. Eventually, search engines will find out about these techniques and the consequences can be bad. A common black hat tactic used by dishonest SEO professional is keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing can be performed when the bad SEO professional uses broad keywords and try to include them all in your webpages. You may get a trickle of traffic from each keyword, but it will be much less targeted, causing on high bounce rate. In many cases, these people simply use irrelevant and unrelated keywords, giving you completely useless traffic. Honest and genuinely professional SEO practitioner actually spends much time fine tuning the keyword selections. It means that each your page will focus only on 2 or 3 primary keywords, resulting in highly targeted traffic. Keyword stuffing will get worse when the SEO scammer stuff dozens of keywords into the meta tags of each page. The person may also ask to modify your content and it will be loaded with high density of keywords, reducing the overall readability.
Excessive repetition will make your content becomes unreadable by ordinary people and it may raise a red flag to major search engines. It is possible that this practice will give you temporary boost in search engine ranking, but it will happen only temporarily. Eventually, search engine algorithm will find out and you can be banished completely from search engine index. When you have hired a SEO professional, it is important that you keep an eye out for any possibility of keyword stuffing. You need to ensure that you sustain a honest SEO campaign to ensure that you get proper results for your effort. It should be relatively easy to regularly check the meta tags of your homepage and individual webpages randomly to see whether there’s illegal act done.
Keyword stuffing can also be combined with hiding text tactic and it’s performed to hide the illegal practice from the website owner and visitors. A whole bunch of targeted keywords and phrases are there, but they can be hidden with specific techniques. Bad SEO practitioner seek to increase SERP by unnaturally increase the keyword density. Blocks of text can be hidden by using the smallest size and using font color similar to the background, such as white or black. The block of text can also be positioned in a spot in the webpage that can’t be seen by readers and website owners. However, search engine is smart enough to detect deliberate hiding attempt.