Quite often, well meaning webmasters will skim through an SEO primer document, or get some third hand information from a friend of a friend of an Internet Marketer, and go to town on optimizing their website.  While Search Engine Optimization techniques are the best ways to improve traffic and ranking, too much of good thing can be harmful!  Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at a couple examples of “over optimization” and save your site from being stamped with the dreaded “SPAM” moniker.

(The following story is true.  To protect the privacy of the individuals, names, places, and actual events that occurred in reality have been changed.)

Over Optimization Pitfall #1:  Keyword Stuffing

Consider the story of Bob.  Bob owns a website called “usedmotorcycles.com” which provides users direct referrals to used motorcycle shops in their city.  Bob’s SEO friend Terry tells him that if he wants to rank well in Google, he needs to target relevant keywords on his site.  Terry even offers his services to Bob at a recession friendly rate, but Bob thinks “I know HTML, I can do this myself”.  So, Bob starts with his Title tags:

<title>Used Motorcycles, Motorcycles Used, Buy Used Motorcycles,
Used Motorbikes,Used Motorbikes for Sale, Used Motorcycles
for Sale</title>

After reading a link Terry sent to him from SEOMoz, Bob reads a little blurb on localization, and decides he needs to build a page for every region in every town he can think of, even though his site is limited to major cities like New York, Chicago, and California.  So now Bob has 100+ pages, all basically the same, with shallow to no content, but such unique titles such as:

<title>Olympia Used Motorcycles, Olympia Motorcycles Used,
Olympia Buy Used Motorcycles,Olympia Used Motorbikes,
Olympia Used Motorbikes for Sale, Olympia Used Motorcycles for Sale</title>

and

<title>Springfield Used Motorcycles, Springfield
Motorcycles Used,Springfield Buy Used Motorcycles,
Springfield Used Motorbikes, Springfield Used
Motorbikes for Sale, Springfield Used Motorcycles for Sale</title>

Pleased with himself, Bob waits a couple of weeks, then checks his Google analytics, and is horrified to see his traffic from search referrals dropped dramatically.  Frantic, Bob phones Terry demanding to know what happened…

Over optimization is where Bob went wrong!

Keyword stuffing was a successful technique many years ago, when search engine algorithms were far less advanced, but today’s search algo’s are far more sophisticated.  They base their results on numerous factors, and keyword density is just one small aspect.  What Bob should’ve done was looked at his changes and thought “How is this change going to benefit my users?”  Obviously, a bunch of keywords that are differing variations of the same theme isn’t useful to anyone…  you only need to say “used motorcycles” once for a user to ascertain what may be on that page.

The key to search engine optimization is, in many ways, not to think of search engines at all, but to think about the real (or fictional) humans visiting your site.

Related posts:

1. Thirdi SEO Tips & Techniques – Get A Site Indexed With Webmaster Tools
2. Thirdi SEO Tips: How To Use Anchor Text
3. Thirdi SEO Tips: Images and Image Optimization

Tags: over optimization, search engine optimization, seo advice, SEO Tips

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