SEO: Don’t Over-Optimize
You’d think that “perfect” things would be valued, right? But news flash! None of us is perfect, no matter how hard we try. Really.
And spiders know that about us wily humans. They have a filter in their algorithm that says… “Hey wait! This is too perfect and humans are nowhere near as smart as us, so Ehhh!!! This page is being manipulated to make us think humans can be perfect. As if that would ever happen.”
What classifies as over-optimization?
One thing that’s a dead giveaway is keyword stuffing. If your keyword density is unusually high, that’s just a red flag. Don’t let it get over about 2%, three at the very highest.
Something else that will get your site dropping like a stone in the results is duplicate content. If you put an article on the front of your site, and the same thing hidden somewhere inside and you see that your site took a nosedive in the SERPs (search engine results pages)… that’s the problem! Spiders sniff that stuff out like bad Limburger cheese — easily.
And never use hidden text to get every one of your 500 keywords into the page. Dumb move! Spiders can’t see color. They see your text that isn’t hidden to them and they’ll know that you just added a list of keywords that have no value. Duh.
Here’s the thing… Google, especially, but all of the search engines, want to see things occurring naturally. That means write with your readers in mind and use your keywords only when it makes sense. Don’t use duplicate content on your own site. And don’t go out and buy or create a ton of worthless links pointing back to your site that hit all at once. Google (again, especially Google) hates paid linking and they look down upon linking to spammy sites like gambling, porn, or link farms where there’s no human editor checking the quality of the links.
Black hat techniques that may have worked just a couple of years ago will get you canned or even de-listed in the search engines, so don’t go there. Really. If you’re going to use SEO for organic traffic, then you should be up on the times. Find out what has changed and do what’s acceptable NOW, not three years ago.
SEO can be a great way to build traffic for your business — over time. It doesn’t happen overnight. But if you take steps that are based upon solid SEO principles, you’ll see it rise steadily and at some point, SEO could be completely driving your business without the need to do anything else. It’s that powerful. And really, that easy.
If you want to learn SEO from the ground up and see how it applies to every form of traffic, then you might want to check out SpiderLanguage.com. I’ve put it in simple terms that anyone, even a really new person to online marketing, can understand and implement because all of the training is backed up by over-the-shoulder videos.
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October 14th, 2009 at 12:21 am #
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