Many small business owners try to learn search engine optimization in order to avoid the high costs that some SEO firms charge. This is understandable since many small businesses don’t have thousands of dollars of extra cash to spend at any one moment.

But, those who are new to SEO run the risk of picking up bad habits or adopting misinformation about search engine optimization that is prevalent on the Web. The two biggest mistakes I see when someone comes to me after SEOing their own website and are disenchanted with the results are keyword stuffing and keyword repetition throughout their web pages.

Keyword stuffing at one time was a useful gray hat technique of placing multiple keyword phrases in the source code and / or on the visible parts of a webpage. Keywords can be stuffed into all different areas of a page in the source code including title, meta tags, comments area, table names and image alt tags to name a few.

Over the past few years, the search engines have gotten pretty good at detecting keyword stuffing and have penalized web pages that practice this technique, which has the sole aim of popping the page up in the rankings. But, alongside keyword stuffing is keyword repetition, which is the second bad habit of newbie SEOs.

Repeating keywords in the title tag, keywords meta tag, descriptions meta tag and image alt tags can drop a page down the SERPs faster than wearing a pair of lead shoes. Now, it must be mentioned that keyword repetition in these areas does not affect all web pages equally.

Just a quick Google searches will tell you that there are some web pages at the top of the SERPs that repeat keywords in their title tags and meta tags ad nauseam and many sites that don’t are found farther back in the rankings.

The sites that generally get away with doing this are generally older sites with lots of back links and little competition. My experience has been that newer sites generally don’t get away with repeating keywords in these key areas.

In fact, I’ve seen many newer websites achieve higher search engine rankings within days of removing the repeating keywords from the areas that I’ve mentioned. This had led me to believe that there is a small, but significant penalty involved for web pages that partake of this particular technique.

So, my advice is, that if you have a newer website that isn’t performing well with keywords repeated in the title tags, meta tags and alt tag areas, then cut out the repetitions and see what happens. Test just a page or two first to be prudent. Also, expect that it may dip in the rankings temporary. Generally, though, the page will bounce back, stronger than before and ranking higher than it was previously.

Filed under: SEO Tips