Keyword stuffing, where is that fine line?

[Red Flare]

I know that search engine users are prone to spelling things differently, incorrectly or in various word combinations. Within each of the product's description, I would like to start placing a section titled: Keywords. It would be followed by several common ways of naming that item.

Example.
I sell an item called Heatsheets Emergency Survival Bivvy Sack by AMK. For example I would like to have additional keywords for that item as follows: Heat sheets, emergency sleeping bag, survival sleeping bag, pocket sleeping bag, disaster sleeping bag, buy emergency bag, purchase disaster bag, pocket sleeping bag on sale etc...

My question is: Would search engines penalize me for "keyword stuffing"? If within each product's description I would place, let's say, 10 alternative names, spellings and combinations of terms. Would that be considered "black hat" SEO practice? Is there a fine line where "alternative terms" become "keyword stuffing"? Or is it better to incorporate alternative names into the product's description itself?


tx for any input

[d_host]

"Keyword stuffing" in the KEYWORDS section can get you banned very, very fast. While it's not necessarily guaranteed they won't ban you if you do this in the product description, it seems to be much safer to do it there, as part of the description itself - but don't just list the keywords and misspellings like you've shown here - make that as part of the description in actual sentences. For misspellings - I'd perhaps keep just those in the keywords section so they are not visible to people visiting your site. Either way - it's not necessary to have the same keyword 1000 times on a single HTML page to have it ranked high. It's a misconception that you have to repeat yourself many times over to get higher rankings - and if anything, that's almost guaranteed to get you banned completely from Google and other search engines. Concentrate on quality descriptions instead - that's much safer and more long-term solution that won't come back to haunt you one day.

[Red Flare]

Thanks Remik,

I had a gut feeling the answer would be what you said.

"For misspellings - I'd perhaps keep just those in the keywords section so they are not visible to people visiting your site."

Did you mean to have a completely separate page for keywords? If a keyword section is within the product description, it would be visible.

[d_host]

No, I meant in the META tags section... otherwise it would, indeed, be visible to your visitors, and I don't know about you, but if I visited a site that had a bunch of misspellings I'd know right away they were simply "keyword stuffing" and likely not bother surfing it much realizing what sort of person or company runs the site. :-)

[Red Flare]

No, I meant in the META tags section... otherwise it would, indeed, be visible to your visitors, and I don't know about you, but if I visited a site that had a bunch of misspellings I'd know right away they were simply "keyword stuffing" and likely not bother surfing it much realizing what sort of person or company runs the site. :-)

How can I edit the META tags section for a particular product? PROD page is dynamically generated, so would I need to insert something into a particular product's header/footer?

kinda lost here

tx

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Insert a conditional statement in your Head Tag to check if the screen is PROD and the product code is the specific product and put the meta data in.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Since most major search engines offer to correct spellings in searches, I wouldn't worry at all about adding miss-spellings unless they are those that would not be corrected by the SE (i.e., proper nouns).

Meta tags keywords have a VERY limited use for modern search engines. Better to focus your energy on building better content on the actual page that uses those keywords.