Optimization, Over-Optimization or SEO Overkill?

To stand as the top search engines' results knows no bounds – neither rules, nor skill. We often see that websites that have been temporarily or permanently removed from major search engines because of malpractice and using “black hat” techniques. The response of search engines is easy to understand with many tricks that include in their armory, the pertinence of returned results is compromised to the point where search engines start to deliver completely irrelevant and manipulated search results. If search engines do not detect your tricks right away, your competitors can report you.

Keyword Density or Keyword Stuffing?

 Sometimes SEO experts want their client sites high in the search engines results and recourse to uncertain practices, like keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is considered an improper practice because we use the keyword in question during the text more often. But the suggested keyword density is from 3 to 7%, anything above this use of keywords will look like keyword stuffing and which can be easily noticed by search engines. The text with more than 10% keyword density not make sense, if read by anyone. Google recently introduced the method called “Florida Update” basically for the pages that are keyword-stuffed or over-optimized.

Generally, keyword density matters more in the meta tags, the headings, and first paragraphs. Therefore one should be careful not to stuff the keywords in these areas. We should use Keyword Density Cloud tool to check if your keyword density is in the acceptable limits in above-mentioned places. If you have a high density percentages then replace the occurrences of the keyword with synonyms. Usually the words in a sentence that are in bold or italic are mostly considered by search engine. But if the target keywords are in bold and italic it will not give you the top page rank results.

Doorway Pages and Hidden Text

Another most common keyword scam is doorway pages. Before Google introduced the Page Rank algorithm, doorways pages were a common custom for the experts and at that time it was not considered an unlawful optimization. A doorway page is a page for the search engines to rank their high page ranking that has no meaning for human beings. While keywords are still very important, today keywords alone have less influence in deciding the position of a website in search results, so doorway pages do not get traffic but if you use them, don't question Google about the punishment.

Similar to doorway pages technique another common scam is hidden text. This is text, which is included in the HTML source of the page, which is unseen to humans but is trying to deceive search engines as if the page is full of good keywords. Therefore we can say, both scams can barely be qualified as optimization techniques, there are more manipulation of the keyword than everything else.

Duplicate Content

In SEO precept content is king but not duplicate content. In terms of Google, duplicate content means using the text from one site copy and pasting to another or same site, then you may await to see the drop in your site's rank. Many of the SEO experts believe that syndicated content is not treated as duplicate content and there are numerous instance of this type of content. If syndicated content were duplicate content, the first to drop from search engine results are news agencies. Still, it does not hurt to inspect from time if your site has duplicate content with another website, because someone may be copying your content and you do not know. The Similar Page Checker tool will help you see percentage of duplicate content comparing to another site.

Links Spam

Links are other important SEO technique where data can be manipulated. While links are undoubtedly important, getting number of backlinks from a group of websites or a suspicion site is begging to be penalized. Also, if you increase your outbound links considerably exceed the number of your inbound links, and then you are putting effort creating useless links because it will not improve your ranking of your site. You can use the Domain Stats Tool to check the number of backlinks to your site and the Site Link Analyzer is used to check number of outbound links you have.

Using keywords in links, domain names, folder and file names does raise your search engine rankings but again, the accurate measure is the border between getting top of the search results and being out of the search. For example, if you are optimizing for the keyword “cat”, which is a quite often chosen keyword and as with all popular keywords and phrases, you may not see other choice for reaching the top. But getting a domain name like http://www.cat-cats-kittens-kitty.com, which is filled with keywords to the maximum but there are two problems first is difficult to remember, and second is if the content does not tally with domain name cats, you will never get top ranking.

Though file and folder names are less significant than website names, then you can comprise “cat” as keyword and in the anchor text of the links. Make a point that anchor text provided are not artificially stuffed. While you have no control over other sites that link to you and use anchor texts that you don't like, it is up to you to check what anchors do other sites use to link to you. A good tool for this task is Backlink Anchor Text Analysis, where you enter the URL and get a list of sites and anchor text other site link to you.

Finally, to Google and the other search engines it makes no difference if a site is intentionally over-optimized to manipulate them or over-optimization for good intentions. So no matter what so ever your motive is, always try to keep to sensible practices and remember that do not exceed the line.