SEO Marketing

Yes! It may seem strange, but believe it or not search engines look at various different criteria on your site for ranking purposes and will penalize you if they decide that you are trying to trick them in any manner.

What they are looking for is any type of unnatural behavior that they will flag for “over optimization” reasons. Basically, this means that you will rank poorly for relevant key phrases in your niche. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to have your site optimized by a professional SEO company or at least someone who is very familiar with what the search engines are looking for and what the latest trends are.

Here are some tell tale signs that you may be over optimizing your website:

• Identical Page Titles and H1 headings
• Excessive internal links
• Keyword stuffing
• Excessive poorly written text below the fold (for the search engines and not the users)

If you find that your website is using any of these tactics, you should make adjustments as soon as possible to get your site back on the right path. The search engines are getting smarter everyday and the best optimization you can do has always been in regards to content. Content is still king! You should always write for the intended audience and not the search engines. Stuffing keywords is definitely old school, but I am often surprised when analyzing prospective clients sites and just surfing the Internet that this tactic is still going on and quite prevalent.

Internal linking is a great strategy and you should definitely use it as part of your on-page SEO arsenal, but be careful not to over do it as the search engines can easily spot this. Finally, please make it a point to write unique title tags and headings for each page and never create a block of optimized copy exclusively for just the search engines (below the fold of your website), which again is obviously not intended for your users and the search engines can easily detect.