Stuffing is great for dinner, but not for your website

Many website owners have been taught to stuff keywords all of their website to artificially boost their search engine rankings.  This doesn't work and it could backfire and get you banned from search engines altogether.  Some simple guidelines can help you avoid this pitfall.  Here are some do's and don'ts.

DO differentiate yourself and your site. 

 You have no realistic chance of ranking in the top ten results for the phrase "real estate."  So peppering your content with the phrase "real estate" without something more specific, isn't going to help.

Where are you most likely to get customers from?  If Southern California, try listing your particular neighborhoods like " Mesa Hills Orange County real estate."  Do you want to target sellers in specific neighborhoods?  Then try "sell Mesa Hills Orange County ."   The point is to understand what kind of web visitors you want.  Don't try to attract tons of traffic that will just dilute your leads, scatter your priorities, and leave you chasing your tail.  Figure out your specific target and then accurately and specifically write it.

DO write like you — and your customers — talk. 

A phrase like " Cuyahoga Falls , Ohio real estate with Summit County listings and executive homes in Akron , Ohio " is rich with keywords — and a lousy way to start off a page on your site.

Imagine you printed a brochure or yellow pages ad that started out with that phrase.  Better yet, imagine you introduced yourself that way when you met a customer in your office.  What would you expect the reaction to be?

DO consider paying for help. 

If you're like most site owners, keyword deployment is harder work than you thought.   If you don't consider yourself the worlds best writer, you might look into hiring a freelance copywriter, they're cheaper than you think.

Whatever you do, write good, attractive, engaging copy that also happens to liberally use your keywords.  Don't mash as many keywords as you can into as small a space as possible.  It will turn away both search engines and visitors.

DON'T simply cram your keywords into your title and metatags. 

It's good to have relevant search terms appear in your page title and early in your content.  It's bad to have them appear too often in your title and early in your content, and nowhere else.

Scatter your keywords liberally throughout your content, don't cram them all into one or two spots.

DON'T underestimate the sophistication of search engine "spiders." 

"Spiders" or "bots" are the programs that crawl the web and index its pages, like yours.  Yes, they're looking for keywords, but they're looking for a lot of other things, too.

They want to see frequent updates.  Don't let your text stagnate — revisit it every so often to freshen it up for the next spider visit.  If you send out a press release, add it to your website. You can also write about local events or trends with interest rates in your area and definitely activate your blog. 

They also want to see what are called inbound links from other web sites.  And, it's easier to get other sites to link to yours if you have fresh, relevant content. Talk to your favorite lenders, neighborhood associations, builders, financial advisors, lawyers, or local business owners and ask to exchange links. The possibilities are endless!