‘Keyword stuffing’ is a general term for the unethical (or ‘Blackhat’) technique of repeating keywords and keyphrases within a webpage so that it ranks highly.

If you’ve read a little about on-site optimisation (see the basic SEO section of posts on this site) you might be tempted to try this, as at first glance it appears to be the answer to ranking highly.

However, search engines measure the keyword density of your pages (the number of times words appear on a page compared to the total number of words). If it is too high, they will consider the page spam and lower it’s ranking or remove it from the search engine results entirely.

Keyword stuffing can also make pages pretty horrible for user - remember, web pages are for people as well as search engines! You have to tread the line between making sure keywords are repeated in a page and keeping it readable.