Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [23]
There were many variations to this technique. Some recommended using very tiny text for a paragraph of content at the top or bottom of the page. After the use of text that was the same color as the background started being penalized by the search engines, the recommendation changed to making it a slightly different shade of color than the background. See the sneaky themes by now?
It’s not that hard for an algorithm to figure out what color the background color is, the text color, and so on. In the grand scheme of online marketing, this was a very small but prevalent technique. The main issue I had with this technique is that it takes away from the content quality. I found that webmasters and site owners were more intent on disguising text from the visitors than they were about crafting a compelling and persuasive message.
Old-School: Keyword Density
Keyword density was a “magical” formula that was based on older search engine algorithms, namely, AltaVista, which would look for the number of times that a word was used within the text on the page. The keyword density formula was created based on the percentage of occurrences of that word, which created a sense of relevance.
Of course, that sense of relevance was completely false as soon as word traveled throughout the Internet that there were specific keyword-density percentages for specific search engines. Webmasters and search marketers immediately created software tools that measured keyword density, and practical “hints” for strategic keyword placement became the fashion on the day.
Of course, much of this was done without regard to actual users reading the content on the website. If you were unlucky enough to have visited a web page that was created by an SEO specialist who was attempting to satisfy a 5 percent to 8 percent density formula, then you might be reading the same word repeatedly, which just becomes obnoxious.
Even worse, there were some who erred on the side of overkill and just overloaded their pages with words in an attempt to create relevance through repetition. This leads directly into the next old-school technique, keyword stuffing.
Old-School: Keyword Stuffing
This technique was marginally successful but rarely effective in terms of actually doing business, because most users who found this type of content simply left the site in search of higher quality.
Figure 2-11 shows a page that employed keyword stuffing. Keywords were stuffed into every imaginable place on the page, hidden or nonhidden, in an attempt to improve rankings. This figure shows keywords listed in alt attributes (behind images), in the content itself, and hidden by making the text the same color as the background. It can easily be found by simply highlighting the content, which shows any hidden words.
Figure 2-11: Keyword-stuffing techniques
All of this was done in the name of gaining rankings, yet the user was consistently the most overlooked factor in the marketing equation.
This technique is still used by many search engine optimizers and marketers. Somehow the old thinking of getting that “magical” percentage of keywords repeated on a single page of content will result in better rankings. It doesn’t. It is overkill to your readers, and it is overkill to the search engines, which have gotten a little smarter over the years and can recognize when an overly aggressive optimizer is too repetitive. One of the best copywriting tips I received was from Karon Thackston at Marketing Words, who said, “Read your copy out loud; if it sounds too repetitive and unnatural, it probably is.” Great advice.
People tend to be able to read sentences much faster and process the information easier than scanning