Adding a List of Keywords

Dear Jill,

Great newsletter. My business partner is developing our site and wants to
put a list of keywords at the bottom of some of our shop pages (i.e. below
the text) in the hopes that this will get the search engines to notice us
slightly more.

I am concerned that the search engines will see this in a similar way to
invisible writing, because it’s there for the search engines not for the
viewer of the page. Would it be considered body text spamming?

I’m suggesting he put it after the text title, so that it’s useful
information for the viewer.

Maybe it’s okay to do both?

Many thanks,

Jenny

++Jill’s Response++

Hi Jenny,

You are correct that anything you do on your pages simply for the search
engines that makes no sense for your real human visitors could be considered
search engine spam.  That doesn’t mean that the search engines will notice
or care, but there’s always that chance.

Just this week I did a phone consultation with a company whose category
pages had lost most of their rankings in Google.  It’s difficult to pinpoint
the reason for sure, but every page of their site had a list of keywords as
the first thing people saw at the top.  There didn’t appear to be any rhyme
or reason for it, other than to try to appeal to search engines.

Basically, it just looked and sounded silly.

A list of keywords plunked on the pages of your website rarely makes sense
from a user perspective, whether at the top of the page or at the bottom.
This is why old-time spammers at least had the sense to make them invisible!
(Not that you should do that either.)

What I never understand about this (and it does come up a lot) is why those
keywords can’t be easily worked into the actual copy of the page.  Are they
not relevant to what you’re offering?  If not, they don’t belong anywhere on
your site and you don’t deserve to rank for them.  If they are indeed
relevant, then it should be a simple matter of writing some descriptive
marketing copy that just happens to use the phrases you would otherwise
stick on the page willy-nilly.

If you’re unsure of how to do that, read Karon Thackston’s past articles
from this newsletter, and/or the articles on her site.  You may want to purchase a
copy of my Nitty-gritty Guide to Writing for the Search Engines as well.

Hope this helps!

Jill