We all want to get to the top of the search engines. It means more traffic, it means more eyeballs, and, ultimately, it means more money. If you aren\’t familiar with the way SEO works, though, you might think the quickest way to do it is to insert as many keywords as you can into your web pages. This is a bad idea. Read on to learn why.

Stuffing keywords, or inserting as many of your keywords into a web page as possible, seems like the right thing to do, and it used to work. For instance, if you were pushing a DUI attorney website, you\’d throw in keywords like \”DUI lawyer Seattle\” \”DUI lawyers Seattle\” \”Seattle DUI lawyer\” and on and on until you couldn\’t think of any more. The thought was the search engines would see this and like this.

But the search engines evolved because people started taking advantage of that aspect of search engine optimization. They began creating sites filled with nothing but keywords hoping they\’d get picked up and placed at the top of the search results – and for a while they did.

The search engines cared about keyword stuffing because it was seriously undermining their mission – to provide great content to people who were using their product to get questions answered. People were searching for Seattle DUI attorney and finding pages and pages of nothing. As you might expect, the search engines started tweaking their computer programs to take that into account.

And then they began to penalize people that did that. It makes sense, since those types of sites are out there only to get people to click on them and then click away, not to provide helpful information.

Because keyword stuffing is not only ineffective but actually harmful to your site\’s reputation with the search engines, it is important to make sure you aren\’t engaging in activities that look like keyword stuffing. The goal should be good content, a few keywords, and lots of backlinks.