Be Careful Not to Over Optimized Websites

If you have a website and are trying to attract visitors, then you have probably read a fair amount of material on search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, there is so much material on SEO that it can be hard to sort through the plethora of often conflicting advice.

When the importance of keywords for SEO was first realized a number of years ago, webmasters were advised to use their targeted keywords as many times as possible on each web page; a keyword density of ten percent was not uncommon. Understandably, such pages were cluttered and very difficult to read by human readers. Then again, they were not created for human readers but for search engine spiders that crawl through the internet providing feedback to their search engines. This practice is now known as keyword stuffing and the search engines have become wise to it. New search engine algorithms have been created (and are constantly being modified) to catch websites that over-use keywords. These websites will then be penalized with lower positions on search engine results pages – usually much lower!

Obvious keyword stuffing is a clear example of over-optimization of a website, however with the constant evolution of search engine algorithms, particularly Google’s, the line between appropriate levels of search engine optimization and over-optimization have become blurred. Now, even  3% keyword density can be consider too high and with the introduction of Google’s Latent Semantic Index (LSI), the pressure is on to write for both the search engines and human readers. As ever, internet marketers are testing new formulas of writing and monitoring the search engine results. However, some of the most successful webmasters do not write for the search engines at all. Their content is written for their intended human audience and in doing so keywords are automatically and naturally included in the writing. The best way to please search engines like Google, is to give them what they want and provide valuable content for your visitors. According to this school of thought, any deliberate optimization of your website is over-optimization. If you build your site gradually and naturally, your page rank will also gradually and naturally increase.

Another aspect of search engine optimization is establishing external links to your website, also known as back links. Back links are very important to your search engine rank, however, the wrong kind of back links can be very detrimental. In the early days of SEO, web masters took actions that fooled the search engines and raised their results page positions. One such strategy was the use of link farms to establish hundreds and even thousands of back links quickly. These links were largely useless and irrelevant to the targeted audience of the website. Consequently, the relevance of back links is now an important component of search engine algorithms. Furthermore, the back links need to be one-way, not reciprocal. One-way links to your site from credible, high ranking ‘authority’ sites offer you the best benefit.

Anchor text is also very important to SEO. Anchor text is the text that appears in a hyperlink and is given a significant weight in search engine algorithms. Anchor text needs to indicate the theme and content of the page it is linking to. However, there is anecdotal evidence that using your keyword in your anchor text, title and content will trip a filter and cause a penalty. It is also possible to over-optimize your website with anchor text by using the same text or keyword in multiple hyperlinks.

The way to avoid over-optimization of your website is to write naturally for your human audience rather than for search engines. If you do this, you can certainly tweak your pages to please the search engines afterwards, but you will be safe from search engine penalties now and most definitely in the future as algorithms become more refined and able to detect manipulative practices.