What is Over Optimization?

Over Optimization

Before we start our discussion on Optimizing our website or blog we should know what is over optimization? Because it is an easy trap to fall into, if someone is new to SEO, he may not consider this over optimization terminology and can easily be penalized by major search engines.

Most of the sites that are following this over optimization strategy got hit by Google in 2011-2012, so we should consider this fact before we jump into the SEO. The best and may be the only way you can tackle this over optimization trap is by remaining natural in your writing. It means you should avoid the following things:

1. Keyword Stuffing
2. Including exact match keyword phrases with no actual content
3. Internal Linking with exact match keywords
4. Page Titles and Heading with exact match keywords which are difficult to understand and do not look natural

Let me explain all of these 4 points so that there would be no misconception about these points.

1- Keyword Stuffing:

Keyword Stuffing means including exact match keywords in your sentences so they look unnatural to human eye and does not make any sense at all. It may also include the frequency of exact match keywords in a single sentence or paragraph. Keyword stuffing is not a good technique for a better SEO strategy and should be avoided.

2- Including exact match keyword phrases with no actual content

It means including your selected keywords in each and every tag like description tags or keyword tags and in every available space like sentences and paragraphs without creating useful content around these keywords. When you do these things, your content would become unnatural and unreadable to human eye (visitors).

3- Internal Linking with Exact Match Keywords

We should avoid linking our website's pages with one another by exact match keyword anchor text. When we do internal linking in this way it would alarm search engines that we are forcing search engines to rank our pages for these exact match keywords, and we really don’t want search engine’s unnecessary attention.

4- Page Titles and Headings

Do not create your page titles and headings with exact match keywords that have no link with the content of the page and provide no sense at all to the visitors. Do not stuff these areas with just key words provide useful titles and heading that are readable to humans and are related to our content on that page.

The main motive here is to be natural and not a robot. When we are creating natural and quality content and present that content in a natural way it would attract more and more organic traffic and people will share these thoughts of ours with their friends. So in result, we would get more exposure and even more traffic. And if you want to monetize your content in future it would help you a lot because Traffic = Money.

 There may be a question in your mind that how I can over smart our competition without falling in over optimization trap?

Answer is really simple that you don’t need a perfect website, page or content, the only thing you need is a better page/website/content or blog than your competitors. Analyze your competition carefully watch out for flaws in their content or website and produce a quality website or content that is better than your competitors and which provides more value to your visitors than your competitor’s website, and be natural all the time.

Now we know what we should do and avoid in Search engine Optimization, we can focus on the main areas that need to be optimized in response to get more organic traffic (search engine exposure) in quickest and shortest period of time.