SEO Step By Step Guide– 153. Beware of Over Optimization Penalty

At times, the SEO efforts that we are taking can hurt our website rather than helping it. Yes, it is true, many webmasters in their over enthusiasm to get good rankings for their website engage in efforts that set off the search engine flags. The problem is that SEO is a time consuming process and all of us want to get instant results as a consequence we try speed up things by over doing them. This invites problems unnecessarily making all our work counter productive.

Before setting out to optimize your website, you must clearly understand the requirements from each search engine. It has to be balanced to meet the requirements of all the major search engines including, Google, Yahoo and MSN. Most often, we tend to limit our optimization efforts to Google and it is one of the search engines with the most competition. Each search engine has its own algorithm and there can be clash or opposing interests between the search engine algorithms. This can be another reason for search engine penalty.

In most situations as a website owner, you do not over optimize your website knowingly, so this is different from black hat SEO. In black hat SEO, you do things to manipulate the search engines knowingly. However, over optimization will still elicit penalty even if you do not do it knowingly. Over optimization penalty will not get your site banned completely from the search results but it will affect your website’s ranking negatively. What ever you have done for months will be undone by a single mistake. For example, you may stuff your web pages with the keywords and this will pull you down in the search results page for that particular keyword. This will affect your traffic that matters most to your website.

Another area of over optimization occurs with text formatting. It is known that using appropriate formatting styles you can enhance the effectiveness of the keywords. For example if your keyword density is high and at the same time each time your keyword appears in bold, underlined, font in italics and marked as h1, h2, or h3, it can set off the search engine flags indicating that there is something fishy about that particular keyword.

Link building too can affect your website. While building links, try to bring variation in the keywords that you use as anchor text to link your website. If too many sources point to your website with the same set of keywords, then you might be ranking low for that keyword. Bring in a mild variation in the keywords so that you are not penalized for over optimization.

Despite what others say, you should know over optimization penalty is real and the penalty is triggered automatically by the search engine algorithm so you will not be in a position to explain yourself as there is no platform for such a thing. Therefore, it is prudent to be careful with your optimization efforts.

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