Ch. 4: The Keyword I Stuffed to Death

An old SEO plugin kept nagging me to hit '2% keyword density,' so on my fitness-supplement site I crammed 'best pre-workout' into every paragraph. Green light, happy plugin.

Month 5: stuck on page 2, $85/mo. The pages read like a robot wrote them, and pogo-sticking was awful — people landed, recoiled, bounced back to search.

I rewrote ten pages to read like a human, mentioning the exact phrase maybe twice and using natural variations everywhere else. The density 'score' went red. The rankings went up — average +6 positions in two months, because Google understands synonyms and topic, not a percentage.

Revenue went $85 to $240/mo across those ten pages.

— Keyword density hasn't been a real factor for over a decade
— Modern search reads meaning, not repetition counts

Lesson banked: If your text reads worse to a human, it almost certainly reads worse to Google too.