What is Over Optimisation and How Bad is it to Your Website?
If you enhance your website with an excess of SEO improvements, they may actually interfere with your site’s SERPs ranking. Your ardent efforts may have created search engine over-optimisation instead of boosting your site’s search engine placement and web marketing results. During the early days of SEO, websites gained a higher rank with use of over-optimisation. You could use keyword stuffing and send myriad spam links to a domain as a fast cure-all for the need to boost your site’s SERPs.
Today, however, link spamming and keyword stuffing are deadly tactics for improving a site’s SEO. During April of 2012, Google instated the over-optimisation penalty. This totally de-indexed websites that still made use of key term stuffing and link spamming. Yet today, with the ever-evolving state of SEO usage, website owners and managers definitely need new tips and advice to refrain from overdoing a good thing.
Updated Tips and Advice Concerning the Perils of Website Over-Optimisation
Today’s updated advice and tips from SEO experts concerning the perils of over-optimising your website and how to avoid its downfalls include the following:
1. Internal Links with Keyword-Dense Anchors. Although the use of internal linking is a helpful SEO technique for your website, using keyword-dense anchor text can seriously weaken SEO. Also, using anchor text that includes the URL of the destination site and using keywords as anchors are bad SEO strategies. Including anchors that are exact matches of destination site URLs occasionally can be a useful search engine optimisation technique, but repeating this practice in excess can result in penalties.
In addition, if you have too many keyword-dense anchors on your site, this may cause damage to your link profile. Remember that your link profile is the most valuable element of your SEO, so you should take all precautions to protect it. One useful and non-harmful way to use anchor text that is rich in keywords is to choose anchors that are identical to the URL of the root domain. For best SEO results, focus strongly on choosing only keywords that are within your industry or niche market.
2. Pointing Links to Top-Level Navigation Pages. To ensure a strong link profile, you should include internal and external links that point to deep internal pages of a destination site. When choosing your internal links, be sure to point to deep internal site links instead of pointing to the commonly visited pages, such as “About Us,” “Services” or “Contact Us.” Most websites today direct links to the homepage or top-level navigation pages of a destination site. On a typical website, the ratio of homepage links to internal links may be 1:1, with 50 percent of these links directed to deep internal links. This is a healthy ratio for good SEO results.
Also link to websites that have a healthy DA, or domain authority, and a top quality reputation or web presence. Sites with low DAs may be over-optimised or have incurred an algorithm penalty. Link only to healthy sites within your niche. By creating an effective content marketing campaign, you can attract new web visitors to your web pages who will link to content on your deep internal links like your blog or news articles page. For best SEO results, you should also avoid using footer optimisation on your site pages since Google devalues links in footers.
3. Keyword-Rich URLs that Are Non-Branded. Never create your website URL merely for its keyword power. If your company name is “Top-Tier Travel” and you create the URL of “CheapestOnlineQualityTravelOptions,” your site may be in jeopardy for over-optimisation. You and your business will be far better served with the use of a well-balanced, simplified brand name for your URL. Also, in order to rank for branded web traffic, your brand name will be your very best URL. With a brand-empowered URL and savvy content marketing, your website and business will be on the path to success.