How To Include Keywords Without 'Keyword Stuffing'

In my last keyword post, Finding Keywords and How To Use Them, I touched upon something called 'keyword stuffing'. 'keyword stuffing' is when you try and fit as many keywords as possible into your content, so much so that your sentences no longer make sense. People tend to give this a go when they're trying to quickly boost their SEO, but Google does not take kindly to these people.

Google wants us all to play nicely and not cheat at the ranking race, so they penalise those who try and cheat the game. Websites who get found of 'keyword stuffing' get pushed down the rankings and are eventually impossible to find, we do not want to be one of these people now do we?

To prevent yourself from 'keyword stuffing' without noticing, make a list of keywords and phrases

and sort them in order of importance. These might be keywords relating to your posts subject if you're a blogger, or keywords and phrases relating to your websites subject if you're a freelancer or small business. Order these by average searches (see the post linked at the beginning to learn about using Google keyword planner to do this) put the most searched for keywords and phrases at the top and the least searched for at the bottom.

Choose your main keyword or phrase for your title. This can be the most popular keyword on your list or one that you feel best fits your subject matter.

Pick 4 more keywords that you think will fit seamlessly into your page/post content. Nobody really knows for sure how many keywords Google likes to be included in content, but it's a safe bet that if they make perfect sense included in your content, then you're safe. Sometimes I will work backwards, write out my post and then try and fit in keywords where they make sense and add to the sentence, a bit like a word jigsaw puzzle.

Proof read until you can't proof read no more. Read over your copy as many times as you can, leave it and go back to it the next day if you have to. This is so you can make sure it makes complete sense to humans, if it feels clunky or doesn't quite make sense, then you'll notice it whilst you're proof reading.

Have you ever found yourself 'keyword stuffing'? Have you had a practice finding your keywords and including them into your posts or website text?