In search engine marketing land, optimization and keyword phrases are like music to our ears, but in our eagerness to show you how to wrangle this whole search engine optimization beast, we forget that there are some very apt pupils among you folk who might go for the extra credit and over-optimize your website businesses.
You’re probably thinking, if a little optimization is good, then a LOT of search engine optimization is better, right?
Unfortunately, there are three main ways to ruin your page’s chance of gaining Internet rankings through over-optimizing your website content.
The first is with duplicating your keywords, title and H1 tags throughout your online business. Yes, it is important to have keyword rich content in these areas, and to use the keyword phrases you are ranking best on, but, you need to have unique content for each of these areas. Otherwise, you run the risk of having too much identical content, which will reduce your overall organic search results, and possibly get you labeled as a spambot by the search engine crawlers.
The second way to reduce your Internet business’ organic search traffic is with bad internal linking. Basically, if you have too many non-contextual internal links in your site, (anything more than 10) you are risking over-saturation of your most popular links at the cost of the rest of your website.
Finally, the last and most tricky piece of over-optimization is the text-to-picture ratio. If you have a website business that is largely graphic, with very little emphasis placed on the text, it might be bothersome to your visitors, who have to scroll, or click to find the information they are looking for. If they text isn’t written well, either, it can be a huge issue, because it is basically killing the optimization on your website by guaranteeing a large bounce rate from irate readers.