With many users looking for medical data on search engines like Google on a daily basis, having a strong online presence is more important than ever for your medical practice to gain more traffic to your website and your medical practice. Using the right SEO strategies, you can ensure that your website is on top of the search result page instead of getting lost among millions of results. If you wish to optimize your website and improve your ranking, reach out to reliable medical SEO companies that can help implement an effective SEO strategy that can improve ranking, drive traffic, and increase ROI.
There are many SEO factors that Google uses to rank medical websites. Even though Google doesn’t provide a proper list of factors that are important for search engine ranking, we know that unique content, good loading speed, and quality back links are some of the important aspects. Out of so many factors, the most important one is the use of the right keywords. Keywords play a crucial role in SEO and choosing the right keywords and using them in quality content is the most effective way of attracting users to your medical website.
What Is Keyword Stuffing?
Keywords define your content. These are words or phrases that users type into search engines to find what they are looking for online. So, if you use quality keywords as your primary keywords then, you have higher chances of better ranking and also driving more traffic to your website. However, sometimes marketers practice keyword stuffing to get more traffic. Keyword stuffing refers to the process of purposely overusing relevant keywords or search terms repeatedly in a text on a webpage or blog in order to manipulate Google’s search engine results.
Why Is Keyword Stuffing Dangerous?
Earlier, this was a successful strategy used by many marketers in an attempt to manipulate page ranking and get more traffic. A website could easily get ranked well by using a large variety of unrelated keywords. But today, Google’s algorithm is highly advanced. With constant updates to its algorithm, Google began penalizing websites that practiced keyword stuffing. It is a black hat SEO technique that can lead to the removal of your content from the search results completely.
Keyword stuffing can be of two types, visible and invisible. Visible keyword stuffing involves repeatedly using a specific keyword multiple times in a content and this can be visible to the users. For instance, consider a medical website that wants a content page to rank high in search results for the term “affordable plastic surgeon”. So, healthcare marketers would include the term “affordable plastic surgeon” excessively in the content, even jamming the keyword where it is out of context or not relevant to the topic. Other forms of visible keyword stuffing are inserting text blocks that just repeat a keyword, and link spamming.
Invisible keyword stuffing is a process where the keywords are used excessively but not in front of the user’s eyes directly. This creates spammy and unreadable text. It includes camouflaging the text by making it in the same colour, same as the background, or you can place the text within the page’s code like meta, comment tags and alt text etc where the search bots can find it.
Both of these practices aim at fooling the algorithm that determine search ranking and attract the search engine crawlers and not for the human readers. Keyword stuffing is not meant for human readers, it is structured just to trick the algorithm and it leads to spammy and artificial content that may not be useful for the visitor. But today, Google’s algorithms are constantly updated with the aim of providing useful and high-quality content to their users. So, the search engine is designed to provide the apt results for users and use of keyword stuffing would lead to penalizing the webpage and its ranking.
Six Tips for Keyword Optimization
- Focus on Search Intent: Identify what a web page is about and understand its main intent. This will help you choose single target keywords that best represent that main topic along with other related search terms. Do not assign any two of your web pages to a single issue or a single search intent. So, go for a new and unique search intent and target search term and this will prevent your web pages from fighting of the single spot.
- Go for Long Content: Quality content is always a vital factor that drives traffic. This means that the longer the content, the more room there is to add various relevant keywords and lesser chances to over spam the text.
- Ensure Good Keyword Density: If you have longer content, you are free to use your target keyword twice, but make sure not to over use it in your content. Use the keyword at the appropriate places, use them only where it fits in naturally. Although there is a little flexibility in the guidelines, the optimal keyword density is around 2 percent.
- Utilize Secondary Keywords and Long-Tail keywords: You can inform search engines that your page is about the target keyword by using secondary keywords, synonyms and long-tail variations in your content. Using such keywords gives search engines extra context that offer proof regarding the main topic of a web page. Long-tail keywords don’t just give more content but allows the search engines to know whether the content contains any answers to questions. You can also use synonyms that helps the search giant to be sure that it’s relevant.
- Add Target Keywords to Page Elements: To optimize a page for a keyword, make sure to add target keywords at all the correct places across the page like the page title, meta description, title tag, beginning and ending of text, sub heading and image alt tag. Keyword optimization lets the search engine know what the page is all about. Adding target keywords in the main body of the content as well as in metadata fields helps to send out strong signals to the search engine.
- Recheck your On-Page SEO: Preventing keyword stuffing alone is not enough for better ranking. It is important to consider all vital elements. So, once you have published a new web page, make sure it’s completely optimized for the selected target keyword by using On-Page SEO Checker. This helps you focus on specific page elements, that lets you know how well each one is optimized for the target keyword.
Keyword stuffing is an age-old black hat technique. However, today it has no effect on SEO. It can also have a negative impact on your website; keyword stuffing has fallen out of favor for high-quality content. It is best to team with reliable SEO companies to ensure white-hat SEO practices, increased online presence, more targeted traffic and conversions.
