Avoid SEO Over Optimization

SEO Optimization TipsBloggers use some creative methods these days for optimizing their blog posts for search engine rankings, but too much SEO optimization can get you in trouble. Here are some great tips to help you avoid SEO over optimization of your blog posts and to keep you on the good side of Google and their bots.

We see a lot of tips and tricks on the internet these days with suggestions on how to best optimize your website for the Google Search engines. Basically, many of these tips are aimed at getting the Google search bots to locate your content, rank it well, and thus build your listing position on the SERPS (search engine result pages) for generic searches which in turn will drive more traffic to your webpages. After all, isn’t more traffic what we all want?

Be Forewarned

Just be forewarned,

Google has changed the way that their search algorithms work and they have gotten a lot smarter about the way they rank pages and the content their bots find on the internet.

The Google algorithms are now smart enough to penalize you for trying to trick them into ranking your content higher based on some of the “Tricks” that have been taught for years. Here are our Top 5 Tips to Avoid SEO Over Optimization.

  1. Content – When it comes to incorporating your keywords into your site content, focus on quality over quantity; relevancy to your blog post and website is the key. Your content should be themed around your blog posts topic and keywords on every single page. Generic wording, redundant statements, and tired clichés are no longer acceptable and can get your blog demoted in the SERPS.
  2. Keywords – When tweaking your blog posts for search engine optimization, blog owners should choose your keywords with utmost care. Spreading a blog’s content and topics too thin will hurt its position on search engine results pages (SERPS) for any particular keyword. Also, search engines may regard a web page stuffed with keywords as a spam page, and remove it from their indexing algorithm all together.
  3. Originality – Let’s face it, bloggers are lazy. Rather than spend 60 minutes a day writing blog posts based on their own ideas or thoughts a lot of bloggers just copy and paste content that they find on the internet and brand it as their own. Don’t do this! Copying someone else’s content will not get your blog post banned but it may get it demoted due to the “Duplicate Content” rule.
  4. Meta Tags – Don’t use meta tags for stuffing your keywords to gain higher rankings. Also, don’t use the names of products or your competitions products in the hopes of ranking higher based on your competitors status. Meta Tags can be a great SEO resource if used correctly and used in relation to their intended purposes. Use Title tags, Description tags and Keyword tags as intended and you will see an boost in your blog post rankings.
  5. Images and Video – Use sparingly and be sure to include the appropriate alt tags as recommended so that the images can be properly indexed by the search engines. Too many images or videos are distracting and do not provide enough data for Google to properly index them. Remember the search engines love textual content while some images and videos can help get your content ranked higher be sure to keep the text to images/video ratio to an appropriate level.

To assist you in understanding how Google finds, crawls, and indexes your site you should checkout the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Google has put together this set of tools and FAQ’s to help all webmasters to understand how Google locates your website and ranks your blog posts. In addition we recommend that you subscribe to the NetworkCEO blog and follow us on Twitter so that you can receive all of our SEO Marketing tips.

 

Comments

  1. Great post, Doug! Amazing content ! I really appreciate the share! Akos

  2. Excellent content Doug! I appreciate you sharing!!! will surely keep all these in mind!! keep it coming 🙂 Karen

Leave a Reply