Keyword usage in eCommerce Sites - Danger of keyword stuffing?

[John_Francis]

Hi all,

I'm having a little difficulty deciding the best approach for selecting my product titles as I've encountered a few issues.

I understand how important it is to try and use the keyword in your product titles, but about the category page that lists all of these products?

One of category pages, for example, has 16 products on it. Each has the product title followed by the keyword. I have also used the keyword in the category title, URL, breadcrumbs and two or 3 times (because it was natural) in a paragraph that describes the category etc. Due to the little amount of text on the page, and the sheer amount of times that the keyword is being used, it looks like I am keyword stuffing (By Moz On Page Report Card). I think it came to 23 uses of the same keyword altogether. This is the pretty much teh same throughout every category page on my site, and think I was penalised by Google for this reason. I'm a relatively new site and have done everything by the book as far as I know, so everything is pointing at this to be the cause of the drop/disappearance in ranking.

How do I rectify this problem? It's important for the products to have the keyword in, right? As this is one of the SEO practices that is given more weight when considering rankings.

I have thought a potential way around this, which is to split the keyword between an exact match, and a variant of the keyword in the titles - only very slightly though. So my product titles would look like 'Product A Exact Match Keyword', 'Product B Variant on Keyword' etc. Could this work? Can anybody advise on the best thing I could try?

I have attached an image to give you an idea of the layout of my category pages - Apologies in advance about my embarrassingly rubbish photoshop skills! I wasn't able to upload directly, so I have attached a link.

Thanks for reading,

John

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[ElBo913]

Hi John,

There are a few things you might consider. Keyword stuffing is relative to the total amount of words on the page, so unfortunately there is no way around it but to generate more quality and unique content that are ideally on the page. You could start with the most important pages to you and see if it helps. The easiest way to add more content to the page, without writing more content, is to set list view as your default. Quality and unique short descriptions would be read by search engines on the category page. You can also try and optimise CMS or blog page(s) for the keywords, but that would take putting in the time and resources to making it really unique and value added. Other ideas would be to put tabs for content on the category page.

So the short answer is yes, it is probably seen as keyword stuffing, relative to the amount of content on the page. I know it's not exactly what you wanted to hear, but I hope there are a few helpful ideas in there for you.