This is a Guest post by Dean Wood. If you like to write for us, do read our Guest Author program.
Google is currently in the process of creating a system that penalizes over-SEO-optimized sites. GoogleBot is going to become smarter; abusers will be out, especially those that use too many keywords and too many links. Google search bots use more than 500 different signals to judge page usefulness and user behavior. Your page will rank high if it’s useful to users, so no need to go nuts over on page SEO factors.
1. Avoid Keyword Stuffing Titles And Headings
If your keyphrase is used all over, from page titles, to H1, H2 and H3 headings and anchor text, GoogleBot will see it as keyword stuffing. Use different keywords and keyphrases throughout your site.
2. Limit Your Internal Links
Internal Linking is a must-do, if you want to expose your most important pages. There’s no set limit on links yet from Google; however, 10 links per page seem normal, for any blog site. But 25, 30 or more?
3. Monitor Your Content For Keyword Density
Whether you use writers, guest posters or write your own content, watch those keywords. If you’re using writers, train them on proper SEO practices. Be specific about how many keywords you want and where you want to place them.
4. Hire A Good Internet Marketing Service Partner
If you’re not sure if your site is over optimized or not, best to hire a good internet marketing company to do those checks for you. A professional group stays on top of Google’s latest rules; such a group can optimize your content without destroying content quality.
5. Do An Alternative Keyword Analysis
Common keywords don’t help you succeed; they may bring down your SEO campaign. Make sure that your internet marketing company runs an alternative keyword analysis to find cheaper but effective alternatives.
6. Don’t Use The Same Anchor Text To Get More Links
GoogleBot is very savvy; it can distinguish between paid and organic links. If you’re earning way too many links through a particular anchor text, Google will consider it as spam. For example, if your anchor text is ‘iPhone apps’, try ‘apps for iPhones’, ‘top must-have iPhone apps’ and so on.
7. Avoid Using The Same Word Combinations
A search bot crawls your page and finds too many sentences loaded with the same keyphrase and keyword combinations. Result? Your search rankings suffer. Write interesting content using similar words, synonyms and phrases that offer the same meaning. Don’t use a particular sentence and phrase combination more than once on a page.
8. Don’t Overuse A Keyphrase In Multiple Areas
When search bots crawl your pages, they will understand which keyphrases you’re targeting. So don’t go and include the same phrase in your page URL, image alt text, anchor text, body, title tag, headers, meta-keywords and meta-description and so on.
9. Don’t Use Too Many Keyphrase Variations
If you’re creating 30 or 40 keyphrase alternatives, it’s just as bad as using too many occurrences of a single keyphrase. Keep your keyphrase variations to a minimum as well – 5 or so per page should do.
10. Don’t Over-Optimize Irrelevant Keywords
Your keywords, though few, should relate closely to each other. It’s a bad practice to try and optimize the same page for keywords that are not related to each other. Identify the keywords that best represent your page’s value and target them. You also can do Image Optimization rather then irrelevant keywords.
11. Use The Keyword Analyzer Tool
Search engines generate a special metric called KeywordRank by accounting how many times a keyword is used on a page. Use the Keyword Analyzer Tool to keep your important keywords’ KeywordRank within the green area. The ranking can be low for non-important keywords. Check your landing pages as well.
12. Avoid Duplicate Content
Duplicate content does not raise a red flag with Google – not yet, at least. However, they can bring down your PageRank. Reorganize your link structure to avoid duplicate content. Specify your Canonical URLs and use a tool such as 301 Redirections to ensure this.
13. Check For Similar Content In Different Pages
Having a similar structure across your website is natural. Menus, footers and headers tend to be the same across pages. However, repeating a piece of long text such as a news announcement or so on multiple pages can flag your pages for increased similarity percentage. Use the Duplicate Content Tool to get the exact percentage of similarity between your site’s pages and try to achieve a below 40% similarity. (Check How to show Links only on WordPress Homepage ? )
14. Avoid Optimizing Multiple Pages With The Same Keywords
Using the same keywords in different pages can affect your page ranking because of internal page competition. Use targeted keywords for each page and avoid using the same for multiple pages.
15. Listen To What Your SEO Plugin Says
If your plugin warns you that a particular page’s keyword density is high, listen to it. Look for advanced plugins that can help you optimize your site better.
If you feel this is too much of information then check SEO Cartoons and feel refresh.
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Article by deanwood
This article is contributed by conversion rate optimization Company Invesp that helps businesses in optimizing landing pages and improving overall experience of website visitors.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi! Jaydipbhai. Nice post. I tell you now my all Keywords going good ranking. relay nice post. Thanks for share new things.
Hi Bhavesh, Thanks for your comment. I’m glad that you liked my post
Loved the pic with the page. ha ha. For me a zero figure would mean over optimized, rather than a fatso. here are some points I differ in opinion about.
Limit Internal Linking to 10 per page?
Wikipedia will be the first to be penalized. This is a myth. All pages of a website can rightfully point to any important page (consider navigation links), it holds true for contextual links as well.
Common keywords may bring down your SEO? ah well ‘Apple iPhone will be the first to fall’ or is it ‘white house’? Common keywords are what a common man searches and a common business needs. So why can’t a common SEO target them?
*Don’t use your key-phrase in multiple areas. Hmnn Not in title, alt tags, body, meta desc, keywords (not many use that), headers etc. Kool even the reader won’t be able to understand what the page is actually about, so how would Google bot penalize us?
*Avoid optimizing multiple pages for same keywords? Ever heard about ‘mega site links’ or Routing competition with multiple SERP results from the same domain?
The more points you add in a write up does not make it more relevant or informative. How you justify each point does. Instead of dictating people what to do and what not to do, I feel its better for SEOs to justify each proposition and let the world decide what to do and what not to do for themselves.
Hi Pattanaik,
Thanks for the great comment. I really liked your observation about the picture and completely agree with you. Now regarding your comments – I think you will agree that every website is different in eyes of search engines . Each website had a unique backlink profile, content type, domain age, loading speed and lot of things that Google counts.
You can’t compare every website with Wikipedia. In my point “Limit Internal Links” – I just want to encourage fair use of Internal linking. The above post contains only 7 Internal links. Now imagine this post linking to 40 other posts , don’t you think it will raise Red flags for Google ? Also, too many internal links are not at all user friendly.
By Common keywords – I mean getting lot of links for a normal keyword . For eg- “Blogging Tips” for this blog. I only recommended that a person should also focus on other keywords that are less common so it looks like a genuine link profile. Again, I won’t recommend you to compare a small website with “Apple” because there is a huge difference.
I haven’t written “Don’t use” BUT “Don’t OVER USE” . Please don’t confuse both things. You should not over optimize a page for single keyword and you can verify this other SEO experts if you like.
Avoid optimizing multiple pages for same keywords – I don’t understand what you’re tying to say. I think optimizing single page for a relevant set of keywords is more effective than dividing your efforts on multiple pages. Just do a search for “wikipedia” you will see 10 results from wikipedia site and each page is different – Wikipedia United Kingdom, Wikipedia Malaysia and lot more. May be you can provide us a better example to claim what you are saying.
At the end, I just want to reiterate what I said in the beginning, Don’t compare your website with Apple and Wikipedia. Each website is different . And, there is no guarantee that things that work for one website will be working for other website too.
All the points I have written are based on my experience. Its OK , if you don’t agree with them.
Thanks again for your comment
Well Guys ! I think I should take credits for finding good picture, It took 30 min of mine for finding relevant yet something different picture. As far as answer is concern I do agree with Dean.
Right not I think the biggest Flag for overoptimization is having the same anchor text back to your website.webpage. It is important to vary that anchor text link. I actually just use the URL as a link back. Than looks much more natural.
Hi Thomas , Thanks for your comment. Using Natural looking anchor texts are more important than ever before. Using a correct mix of anchor text is a good strategy in long term.
Brilliant post, seen bits and pieces about the new Google Policy but after reading this you have made everything clear to understand. I fully agree with Google. Iv been saying this for a while about over optimizing.
Thanks Sarah for your comment. I’m glad that you liked my post
Generally the most mistakes comes from duplicating the content and using not proper keywords everywhere,
Absolutely must is to track the positions by keywords and monitor competitors by keywords-I use Colibri to such work.
Nice article by the way.
Greets
mmm it is a good article….the intertnet searching and analysing process was very speed….