Keyword Stuffing - Ecommerce websites
-
Hey Mozzers,
Im undertaking a content audit and its going very well, we have written some better content for the first set of pages, it still needs some improvement but we have a good base and starting point from which we can make an SEO log and work on it over time. For the content I used the following formula for how many times to include a keyword
Word Count / Length of Keyword. (eg. 600 words / 3 word keyword = 200). Then 1-4% of this (2-8 times).
This has worked well for me in the past and has been a good base guide. I have ran the pages through Moz optimiser and every single page hit an A for keyword page optimisation. However many of the pages failed on keyword stuffing, which obviously has high priority.
My dilemma is that, moz counts 15 as the cut off for keyword stuffing with the written text we have done really well with using it a set number of times. But these pages are product category pages. The keyword in the extreme of cases is listed 7-9 times in the side nav menu. 7-9 times in the product category listings.
Take for example *** it is optimised for thermometers (i know it a tough single word keyword, and we have fairly modest aims with it, im using it here for example purposes). The word is used a good number of times within the article but is sent through the roof with the links to the sub categories. This page for example mentions the keyword 30 times.
Can anybody suggest any ways to improve on this? Is how we display the categories in the nav bar and in the page excessive?
As always many thanks!
-
You're very welcome
-Andy
-
Brilliant, thanks andy much appreciated. Valuable feedback as always
-
What makes it "less of an issue" if the words are within the menu structure? Is there some info you could provide that backs this up?
Google has never really counted what is in the menu as page content. Some mega-menus are huge and carry many more occurrences of words than you have. They are pretty smart in that respect.
One thing you could do, is break the menu up so you have a heading of "Thermometers" and then list the types below that?
As another follow up question, the text uses the singular version 7 times and the plural 10. Would these be seen as the same word in the context of keyword stuffing?
Yes - Stemmed words are seen as the same. If you look in your Webmaster Tools account (Google Index --> Content Keywords), you will see words that are used and the variants of those words. As an example from a client I am working with at the moment.
|
- recruitment, recruit, recruiting, recruited, recruits
|
I suspect you will see Thermometer and Thermometers as variants.
-Andy
-
Thanks for the feedback Andy,
Its always nice to here a a fairly straight forward "that doesn't sound natural" it lets us know we need to review it.
What makes it "less of an issue" if the words are within the menu structure? Is there some info you could provide that backs this up?
I will look to reduce the keyword usage in light of what you have said
As another follow up question, the text uses the singular version 7 times and the plural 10. Would these be seen as the same word in the context of keyword stuffing?
-
Keyword stuffing is always a tricky one as sometime common sense means that there are multiple mentions of a word, but if it is in the menu structure, then it is seen as less of an issue. However, when I look at that page, there are a lot of occurrences in the content and when reading that, it actually sounds quite unnatural. 17 mentions in just a few hundred words is more than I would be comfortable with.
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
Keyword Cannabalisation & Ecommerce
Hi I have an Ecommerce site, with a lot of similar products - for example leather office chairs - 80 products all very similar.. We worked to optimise product pages for longer tail phrases such as black executive leather office chair, but we now have different product pages trying to rank for these longer tail phrases as well. Now I'm trying to decide whether to focus on some priority product pages - adding lots of useful content/videos etc to try & boost the ones we want to rank for the long tail. OR whether to focus on the category page, and getting this to rank for all keyword variations... I'm a it stuck - any advice is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Keyword phrase for entire site
Hey everyone! I'm fairly new to SEO but I have a large number of sites I'm needing to SEO. I'm a tad confused as to how many keyword phrases I should use throughout my site. For example, my site is www.uluru.travel. I want to rank highlight for the phrase 'uluru tours' throughout the site, as many of my pages list uluru tours and people searching for this phrase are my type of customers. As you can see I've tried to do some basic on page SEO for that phrase by including it in page title, headings etc. But the entire site doesn't seem to rank very well. Would you guys suggest trying to target 'uluru tours' phrase throughout the entire site of just focus a couple of pages on this term? Any advice is greatly appreciated guys! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mysites0 -
One word Keywords
Hey as you know that as a seo we are, we always optimize keywords which are at least 2 words, and lets say I'm trying to optimize a page for terms like "man clothing, man london clothing, man great collection, man stylus collection" and as you can guess I optimize this pages for this keywords by inputting them into title heading tags and body.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
So my question is , what if google takes "man" phrase from my 2 words keywords, and pretend as a my keyword. (I mean what if google thinks my keywords is man because as you can see in all of the keywords "man" is in all of them.)
And what if Google thinks the density of "man" probably would be %20 which is astronomic number.? Sorry for my bad english.0 -
How to increase the traffic and keywords ranking
Am working on a website http://www.greavescotton.com. A month ago most of the keywords were in first page. This month I have noticed the fall of keyword rankings. I have checked the webmaster tools for any mails and messages but I did not find any. So can anyone please visit the site and check it and please give me the suggestions accordingly to increase the traffic and keywords. Also I would like to know the advantages of commenting in Youtube.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
External links from banned websites
Currently working with a client that has seen his rankings diminish after the penguin update. I've manually analyzed all his 600 backlinks and identified approximately 85 external links from websites that have been banned by Google. How do these sites affect his current rankings? Should i just disavow all these links using the Google disavow tool? Any comments would be highly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nick_Johansson0 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0 -
My website keywords have been almost completely taken out of indexing in Google since 04/26/11 and I cannot determine why, anyone know?
I had 12 to 15 1st page Google rankings in the iPhone, iPad, app review vertical. As of 04/26/11 I have lost all rankings, traffic has gone from 1,000 to 1,200 a day to 150 to 350 a day. I was using a plugin for auto press releases, but have removed this and deleted the urls. I also have changed themes and hosting over the last 3 weeks. I have been trying to get SEO help, but cannot seem to get anyone to help me. thank you Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crazymikesapps1