keyword spamming

Key rule for creating web pages: Web pages should always be written to appeal to the real human visitors to your site. This means a site should have good content, written naturally, that is informative and interesting to visitors. Any attempt to manipulate the search engines by adding useless to increase the ranking of a web page can often have the opposite effect: web ranking penalties, or removal from the search engine index.

Keyword spamming can occur when too many phrases are stuffed in the meta tags, or small visible text, on a webpasge. This often is done on eBay auction pages, where eBay sellers are often tempted to include extra irrelevant keywords in their auction titles and descriptions in the hopes of attracting more visitors. The end result is that it only brings unqualified traffic to the page, that is, people who aren't really interested in the item offered, and it is a potential turn off to people who are interested because at best they get confused by the extra irrelevant words, and at worst they suspect some kind of scam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_stuffing - Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags

Webmaster world has excellent discussions of the issue of keyword spamming and keyword stuffing on web pages. Here is a sample discussion: webmaster world discussion on keyword spamming. The best suggestion there is:

One piece of advice that i have to give you is to write naturally. Do not sit there and start counting how many keywords you have on your page. Write good content about the topic that your visitors are searching for. Remember that visitors dont come to your site to look at your content, they come to find their information.
As for placing on the top 10 with google, i would say to simply exchange links with other webmasters. Use the your keyword, or keyphrase as the linking text to place on the website you are trading links with. So if you wanted to improve rankings on your "Blue Widgets" page, you would exchange with other sites..and use blue widgets as your linking text. Hope this information helps.

That advice is so important, let's really highlight it:

Write naturally and you will be fine. Dont write for the search engines.

When other webmasters link to your pages using the phrases you think are relevant for your website, search engines will see those links, and consider those keywords in the links very strongly as they decide where to rank your page for queries that include those keywords. Google calls this their "pagerank" algorithm, and having incoming links to your website including relevant keywords is a very important part of website promotion.

Here is a good blogpost on the topic of modern search engine optimization, and includes links to lots of other articles on this topic: (BTW, her site came up in the top ten for the google query keyword spamming, and yet you don't see that phrase gratuitously repeated...)

It takes time to come up with a list of keywords to attract a search engine. You have to research which words are the most popular.... This is a lot of work. So why not put that energy into writing articles with those keywords instead?