The Fourth Commandment Of Article Marketing – Thou Shalt Not Spam, Neither Articles, Nor the Keywords in Them

We wrote the 10 commandments of article writing series for those people who want to achieve more search engine traffic. There are many misconceptions around this subject.

Believe it or not, you can make the articles you write “spammy.” Some individuals do this to achieve higher search engine placement. Sometimes it may work for a short while, but search engines do catch on. When they catch on, they will then knock the website out of its higher search engine placement and into a lower position. This is called “sandboxing” and it happens all the time. Work has to begin all over again to achieve that top ten placement.

But how can search engines be spammed like this?

Well, the main issue is the keywords. There is a term called “keyword stuffing.” This is when there are too many keywords in the articles. Basically, it is unreadable to a human being because the keywords appear so frequently. They may not even make any sense within the article. They are just there to be indexed by search engines.

The ideal concentration of keywords is around 1 to 2%. This is because the articles are still readable and the keywords make sense. To figure this “density,” you have to take the number of words the article is to be and multiply it by .01 or .02. That will give you the number of times your keywords are to appear.

Another issue that tends to come up when using articles to spam search engines for higher search engine placement are keywords not relevant to the niche. For instance, the niche may be finance, but some of the keywords that are used are relevant to both finance and accounting. This is someone trying to pull in those interested in finance and those interested in accounting. Sure, this may increase traffic, but that is unwanted traffic. The search engines can tell the difference, which is why this need not be done.

So the idea is to use the correct quantity of the correct keywords so that you can achieve higher search engine placement and get the results you need. More search engine traffic will come to your website if you avoid wrong keyword use altogether. It is easy to understand that Google, or any search engine for that matter, wants to be able to serve the results that people want.

When you are a book keeper and you type a search query that produces three pages full of results targeted at finance people, you might become impatient, which is normal. When one is working, it is frustrating to be wasting one’s time. After all, businesses that want to make money need to be efficient.

Google knows this and they are doing their very best to serve results that are content rich and relevant to what people are looking for. Naturally, there is this small minority of people who still believe that taking the easy way out will be rewarding and so they try to manipulate their pages so as to try and “fool” the search engine calculator into believeing their page is worth putting right at the top of search results.

Sometimes, this works, but mostly the engineers at Google, who’s work it is to improve the service quickly catch on and they correct the issue by throwing the cheats out. They should only be congratulated for this, alas, many times, well meaning publishers also get the boot. It is a classic example of the good guy having to pay for the bad guy’s roten behavior.