Heavy-duty keyword stuffing is a distinct don’t for current SEO best practices. Google and other search engines penalize sites that overuse keywords as low-value vehicles for links instead of rich, relevant content. Keyword stemming, on the other hand, is very much in style.

Keyword stemming refers to layering related keywords and phrases throughout your content the way they’d naturally occur. You probably wouldn’t use the same phrase ten times in a few minutes of conversation even if you were discussing something very specific, but you might use versions of that phrase, incorporating it as different parts of speech or using synonyms for it. Your primary keyword is the stem, and variations of it branch out organically to create a keyword-rich yet relevant and compelling article.

Context Is Everything

Search engines rely on dozens of embedded and contextual cues to determine a site’s relevance to your query. On-page, embedded cues include search terms in the meta title and meta description, links to and from the page, and the site’s URL. These baked-in keywords are indexed as-is by Google, but contextual cues are more nuanced. They allow search engines to weigh words that are related to, but not identical to, the anchor text and meta data on the page as relevant.

For example, if your site offers content writing services, then “content writing” is your primary keyword. Stemmed keywords might include “content writers,” “writing content” and “content written.” Including these variations on a theme hits search engines’ sweet spots; they don’t look spammy or keyword-stuffed, and they’re easier on human visitors’ eyes. It’s tough to twist a 500-word blog post to fit the same long-tail keyword a dozen times to approach a 2.5 percent keyword density, but it’s easy to include it and its close relatives naturally in an article.

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Any SEO specialist with a decent amount of expertise can tell you about the latest Google algorithm changes and explain why the old optimization tricks no longer work. They can tell you why keyword counts and high-volume, low-content backlinking strategies are ineffective at best and could actively harm your reputation. By focusing on the nuts and bolts of SEO, however, they often miss the single biggest mistake any company can make when outlining its online marketing strategy. The most egregious error in SEO isn’t a single sin of commission or omission but an outlook.

If you consider your company’s relationship with search engines an adversarial one, you cannot succeed at SEO in the long run.

When content marketing strategists see search engines as the enemy, a force to be manipulated and a system to be gamed, their site traffic will inevitably be throttled to a trickle. Eventually Google, Bing and Yahoo will update their algorithms to close the loopholes they’d used to gain an advantage. Black-hat SEO relied heavily on exploiting weaknesses in search engines’ algorithms, something that was simpler to do when the systems weren’t as sophisticated as current search engine technology. When you see an article with little substance, poor grammar and plenty of unrelated keywords, you’ve stumbled across a relic of outmoded black-hat tricks intended to fool search engines.

Search engines changed to keep ahead of these low-value sites and provide meaningful results to their users. Major updates like Google’s Panda and Penguin were the direct results of attempts to game the system and get unearned high placement on search engine results pages. Google’s anti-spam guru Matt Cutts has said that the search engine giant undergoes more than 400 updates annually, and while some are small fixes, others have a major impact on SEO tactics. The fight against spam sites and low-quality content is never-ending, and if you want to avoid becoming a casualty of the conflict, choose the side that eventually wins every battle.

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Google undergoes updates on a daily basis, but most are invisible to end users and even to SEO experts. One big change that came in shortly after the Hummingbird algorithm update, though, threw some SEO content providers into an uproar: The search engine giant confirmed that it intends to encrypt searches, effectively shutting down keyword data released to webmasters. The process started in 2011, but has accelerated after the Hummingbird changes, leaving many SEO experts and content marketers wondering where to go next.

Without the keywords provided by Google Analytics, many thought, how will content creators know which way to go? Do these changes mean keyword usage in SEO is dead? Should marketers turn away from content marketing or SEO and toward conventional tactics? On the contrary; the changes mean that optimized content is more important than ever.

Over-reliance on keywords and backlinks may have let some SEO firms game the system and artificially push sites that were light on content and heavy on ads to the front of Google’s results pages in the past, but that strategy no longer works. Google’s stated reasoning behind encrypting keyword data is to provide greater privacy, but in the process, the old standards of analyzing keyword data and stuffing articles with them have become obsolescent. That doesn’t mean the keywords no longer work, though; it just means webmasters won’t be able to catch a glimpse behind that particular curtain.

The solution is simpler than it seems: Write naturally about a subject while linking relevant information, and your content will automatically contain the necessary keywords and backlinks to succeed in the post-Hummingbird Google environment. Just because the handy list of keywords is slowly being replaced with “not provided” results doesn’t mean the keywords aren’t still effective; they’re just invisible to those who might otherwise use them to artificially inflate a website’s value to Google users. In other words, a site that has intrinsic value – one with rich content, engaging writing and must-share news – will win out over one that relies solely on mechanically derived keyword densities and low-value backlinks.

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Google remains the giant among search engines, but Yahoo and Bing are gaining in popularity, especially in some demographics. For older computer users who buy plug-and-play desktop systems, the easy accessibility of Bing has made it an increasingly popular option, but the Microsoft-owned search engine has something else in its favor: it’s optimized for social media. As the new kid on the block, Bing is ready to take advantage of sweeping changes in search engine ranking factors while its older competitors have had to retro-fit to take social media data into account. Continue reading

Google’s Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird updates have put a tremendous squeeze on some types of SEO content. Heavily keyword-stuffed, back-linked and spun content that once rocketed to the top of the search engine’s results pages are now relegated to the hinterlands, relics of an age in which search engines were unsophisticated and black-hat SEO tactics flourished. The increasing pace of change and the severe penalties for using outmoded or questionable SEO techniques has led some industry outsiders to conclude that SEO specialists and even SEO itself are obsolescent if not obsolete. Continue reading