Keyword Stuffing

Where to Place Keywords

It is important to stuff your keyword into the title, headings, image alt statements, hyperlinks on the page, hyperlinks pointing to the page and in your general keyword rich text.
How to: Keyword Stuffing

General techniques for keyword stuffing are to use invisible text, the hidden input tag, or back in the day people would duplicate tags or repeat the same word over and over again in the meta keyword tag.

Some people also use the keywords way too often in the visible page copy to where the page reads horrible.
Why Keyword Stuffing is Bad

Using a keyword over and over again, the keyword becomes more and more targeted until it is too rich in density. The page may trip a spam filter or sound goofy to readers...either way the page will not convert.

Search engines such as Yahoo! actively edit their search results. If you are caught keyword stuffing by an editor or competitor your site might get banned.
The Correct Keyword Density

Generally I do not fret much about keyword density. I make sure to get my keywords in inbound links, at the beginning of the page title, in the meta description, in the page header and most of the sub headers and in the page content.

Just doing the above will give you a more than sufficient keyword density.

For competitive terms page copy is not heavily weighted in most search engines either.

Keyword stuffing can be considered to be either a white hat or a black hat tactic, depending on the context of the technique, and the opinion of the person judging it. While a great deal of keyword stuffing is employed to aid in spamdexing, which is of little benefit to the user, keyword stuffing in certain circumstances is designed to benefit the user and not skew results in a deceptive manner. Whether the term carries a pejorative or neutral connotation is dependent on whether the practice is used to pollute the results with pages of little relevance, or to direct traffic to a page of relevance that would have otherwise been de-emphasized due to the search engine's inability to interpret and understand related ideas.