If you are cooking a special dish, it’s very important to use the right quantity of every ingredient. Any digression will result in a disaster. The same goes for SEO. Applying SEO techniques excessively on your website with the sole intention of improving PageRank is just like ruining your dish with too much of something. Here are some of the things you should steer clear of to avoid over optimizing your website:
Meta Tags – HTML meta tags lie between the open and closing head tags in the HTML code of a document. They inform browsers about the page. Stuffing keywords into meta tags is an example of over-optimization. An ideal title tag is one that clear and compelling but uses keywords only in a natural way – without overstuffing.
Page Content – Take care not to over optimize your content by repeating keywords. Take a look at this content, ‘Our shop mainly sells orchids. You can order the orchid both online and offline. We can deliver your orchids quickly. Our orchids are affordably priced’. The keyword ‘orchid’ is repeated unnecessarily, a classic example of over-optimization.
Links – If you get backlinks from other websites to your website to improve your PageRank without checking the quality or relevance of the link, you are over-optimizing your site with backlinks. The indiscriminate distribution of internal links and extensive use of exact match anchor texts (placing keyword as anchor text) are also instances of over-optimization with links.
When websites began to indulge in over-optimization to improve their search page ranking, poor quality sites appeared on the top of search results. Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms were introduced with the aim to curb such over-optimization, among other things. These algorithms track all types of over-optimizations and penalize the erring websites with negative ranking. Panda targets anchor texts over-optimized with the keywords so that your site get penalized if large number of unnatural links are pointing to your website. Penguin targets all kinds of on-site over-optimization including keyword stuffed content, unnatural backlinks, irrelevant anchor text linking internally to information on a site, and more.
Google’s penalties are not easy to recover from and severe ones can even result in homepage removal. So how can you avoid a penalty by ensuring that your website is not over-optimized? Conduct audits on your website to check whether your web page content flows naturally and is not keyword stuffed. Remove unnecessary links. Consult a reputable SEO company offering professional content development services and link building services. This will ensure that your site conforms to the latest search engine guidelines and the best SEO practices.