Over-Optimize And Be Penalized

I assume you're familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO, because everyone seems to be. Well, this article will be something about SEO too, but with a twist. I want to caution readers about over-optimizing your website or blog because doing so may get you penalized by search engines.

Common Forms Of Search Engine Over-Optimization:

1. Repeating keywords or keyword phrases too often
2. Breaking up the proper flow of paragraphs in an article or post to facilitate keyword stuffing.
3. Over-emphasizing your article or post by repeatedly using text modifiers such as bold, italic or headline tags.
4. Purchasing inbound links or exchanging links with low quality sources.
5. Creating backlinks by leaving comments on blogs or forums and repeatedly using the same anchor text.

Over-optimizing will increase your organic ranking over the short term, but eventually search-engine spider bots will flag your website.

Good Optimization Practices:

1. Have unique and useful content, with proper keyword density. Unique and relevant content is one of the main factors the latest Google Panda algorithm iteration is looking for.

2. Optimize your articles by including your main keywords or keyword phrases in your title and description tags, which should also be unique for each page.

3. Include your keywords in heading tags, and at the beginning and end of your article, plus have variations of your keywords salted throughout your content. However, make sure including your keywords still allows for correct sentence structure and grammar, and that articles and posts make sense.

4. Have your keywords optimized within your URL. For Bloggers that means your permalinks should be based on your keyword or keyword phrase, and not a numbers or dates.

5. Do not link too deep, with folders containing viewable content within other folders. Use as few folders for content as possible. For example: do not have a folder structure like articles/SEO/pagename.html and another socialmedia/twitter/pagename.html, and so on. Better, go with SEO as a folder, and place every related html file there. Ditto for a folder called socialmedia. It may be easier to have folders defining the content in detail when you're looking for something, but doing so is at the expense of optimization.

6. Your articles and videos should be interlinked for related content, as well as related articles interlinked too. This will greatly help with flattening of your site architecture.

7. Have only relevant, high-quality inbound links and outbound link only to related sites with higher ranking than yours if possible.

Following these few basic guidelines of search engine optimization will earn you a decent amount of organic search engine traffic. Whereas, to over-optimize your blog or website may cause you to be penalized.

If you're guilty of over-optimization, stop doing so now and I suggest going back and editing some of your blog posts and website articles, as well as any page title and description tags that need it. I'd also recommend that as you revisit blogs or forums you have commented on previously, and used repetitive anchor links that you edit those you can, or even delete some if that is the only option available. Then, moving forward, stick to standard optimization practises and you'll most likely avoid a Google Slap or other form of penalizing for over-optimization.

Len Bowcott have been an affiliate marketer since 1995, and has recently started offering consulting services to clients seeking to enhance their online presence. Len guarantees his clients results, achieves what was promised, then expects to be paid. Visit PlutoCrazy Blog for more SEO tips and techniques.