Don't Over-Optimize Your Site – Practice From Semalt

Oliver King, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, says that over optimization is a practice of using too many SEO tricks that eventually begin destroying a site's ability to rank. Search engine optimization (SEO) affects the visibility of your website in the search engine results, but over optimization cannot drive organic traffic to your web pages. Here is everything you should know about over-optimization.

1. Keyword-rich anchor text for the internal links:

Internal linking is good but using keyword-rich anchor text cannot benefit your website. You should remember that the anchor that uses the URL of the destination and the anchor that uses lots of keywords are bad for your site. If you think that such links are useful to go with, you should not forget that we are discussing over-optimization. The occasional anchors that match the URLs contribute to positive SEO. However, if you repeat the process again and again, you are over optimizing your site, which is terrible for its search engine results.

2. Irrelevant keywords

You should not drive traffic to your website using irrelevant keywords. There were times when the webmasters placed adult-themed keywords in their articles to gain some search engine traffic, but any website with adult content cannot survive for long. It's just an example of over-optimization; you should never use non-relevant keywords and don't write low-quality articles at any cost. As Google and Yahoo index your website, they will consider all primary keywords that you've used in your posts. If you have used irrelevant keywords, the search engines will never improve the ranking of your site.

3. Point out the internal and external links:

It's safe to mention that the strong links always point to deep internal and external pages. Most often, the webmasters and bloggers use irrelevant links and try to drive traffic to the homepages or the top-level navigation pages. For such websites, the rate of homepage links is always higher than average. Thus, you should build quality backlinks, ensuring that all of your articles are properly indexed in the search engine results.

4. Use of H1 on different pages:

You should never use H1 on the main page of your website. Unfortunately, various bloggers believe that white hat SEO means using lots of headings, but that's not true. If you use more than one H1 tag in a single article, you are over-optimizing it.

5. Links to toxic websites:

The websites that you will link to are essential and should be non-toxic. Various webmasters and bloggers are ignorant of the peril of the links. They keep linking their articles to malicious pages and low-DA websites. If you link your site to toxic web pages, the chances are that you will receive black hat SEO repercussions.

6. Keyword-stuffed conclusion:

The footer of your articles should be free from lots of keywords. Over-optimizing the footer is a black hat SEO practice, so you should never use more than two keywords in this part. Evidence revealed that Google and Yahoo devalue the footer links and penalize websites with keyword stuffing.

Conclusion:

There are various underlying problems with over-optimization. If you focus much on technical SEO and try to use a large number of keywords, the search engines might ban your website for a lifetime. Creating a website with perfect SEO practices is the only way to succeed.