SEO – What NOT to do

Is there a such thing as “over-optimizing”?

Dog is in trouble because of bad SEO practices

Your SEO is bad!

When it comes to SEO, over-optimizing and bad habits can cause your site show low or not at all on a search engine’s results page.  Below are some common SEO bad habits to avoid.

  • Keyword stuffing/spamming/abusing: When desperate for rankings people will often resort to just repeating keywords as often as they can. Good SEO focus’ on proper keyword usage and the best test for this is to read your content out loud. You’ll know if it sounds ‘keyword stuffed.’One way to avoid keyword stuffing is to use different variations of your words and phrases and look for synonyms that you can get in there. That eliminates the over usage of one phrase and it creates more phrases for which you can be found.
  • Lots of low quality links: This dates back to the days of the good old fashioned link exchange – As with most things in SEO, it’s about balance and quality links to many different pages. These kind of links are hard to obtain but Google doesn’t care. It’s what they want. Most people want a quick easy link fix and it was never a good idea but it’s even more important that you avoid it these days.
  • Too little content on the page but lots of “optimization” – give the search engines some content with which to promote you in their listings! The rule of thumb is still 250 words of succinct content.
  • Link farms/networks: There are two ways this can hurt you.
    • If you are running a link farm – which means too many links on a page, none with any real text or purpose other than giving out links.
    • The second way is having a link farm/network linking to your site (especially if the same ones have multiple links back to your site).

It is surprising that such a big deal is currently being made about this – over optimization has always been a bad thing.

It’s been called spamming and black hat (which also involves cloaking and various other nefarious things.) The bottom line is Google continually works on the way their “spiders” work to offer good, relevant sites in their searches and to weed out bad sites.

You do need to optimize but it needs to be in a “natural” way. Well written content, focused on the words and phrases of your market have always gotten good search engine ratings!

CeJay Websites, LLC can direct and implement your graphics marketing strategies for promoting your business through the Web, display ads, presentations and video marketing. We know how to work with your sales and marketing director staff. We are committed to providing creative and cost-effective solutions.