Top Tip Tuesday – Avoid Duplicate Content & Keyword Stuffing

Writing good quality content is an important component of your SEO strategy. It has many benefits, including ensuring visitors have a  clearer understanding of your brand, business, products or services and increasing engagement with your website pages that help reduce the bounce rate. Two cardinal rules to keep in mind are avoiding both duplicate content and repeating keywords (keyword stuffing), explained by Jay in the video above.

Let’s look at these two rules in a little bit more detail:

Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place. That “one place” is defined as a location with a unique website address (URL) – so, if the same content appears at more than one web address, you’ve got duplicate content. Even though this is not technically a penalty, duplicate content can still impact search engine rankings for the following reasons:

1. In order to provide the best search experience, search engines avoid showing multiple versions of the same content and therefore end up choosing which version is likely to be the best. This dilutes the visibility of every duplicate page. If you’ve copied content from a more authoritative page on another website expect to see their page in the results instead of yours.
2. Link equity gets diluted. Instead of all inbound links pointing to one piece of content, they link to multiple pieces, spreading the link equity among all the duplicates.

Don’t repeat keywords

Repeating keywords or keyword stuffing is the practice of shoving as many keywords onto a page as possible in an effort to make your page appear for that keyword. This not only makes your content painful to read for your visitors, it could lead to your website being penalised. Let’s break this down!

If you have two keyword occurrences in 10 words of text, you multiply that by 100 to get a 20 percent keyword density. It is estimated by many SEOs experts that between three and five percent is an acceptable range for density.

Struggling to not repeat the same keywords across the page? No problem! Just add semantically related words to the page.  These are words which mean the same thing or nearly the same thing (e.g. Bicycles, Cycles, Bicycle).

Don’t worry, Google gets it.

Search engines are now advanced enough to recognise the similarity or relevance between words related to a specific subject or set of keywords.

We’ll be back with more expert SEO tips in our Top Tip Tuesday series next week!