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How Much SEO is Too Much SEO?
March 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I was stumbling around on the web reading about SEO, and other marketing things, when I passed by Jill Whelen’s site and found a posting about SEO, and how you can be over optimized. Jill was saying that being perfectly optimized may lead you to being dropped from the listings. Her explanation goes to Google and how they really don’t like SEO people, because, afterall, we are indeed trying to get a site listed in the top of the results, when in reality, Google wants to make that decision. She talks about it here: http://www.highrankings.com/art-of-seo.
I believe Jill is right on the money. See, Google wants sites with merit to be high in their listings. When we, as optimizers, improve a site so that it more closely meets the requirements of their algorithm, we are actually pushing a site into the top listings that Google would not normally put there.
So, and I have mentioned this before (Jill I’m thinking all the time too!) too much of a good thing can turn bad. Things like alt= tags don’t necessarily always need to have your keywords in them. It can become overkill. All of your anchor text doesn’t have to be your most important keywords and phrases. Think about this … how many times have you seen a link where the anchor text says … “Click Here”. Quite a number, I’m sure. So, in the natural order of things, within the Google database, there should be a significant number of links pointing at your site that say “Click Here”. My point is, you don’t want to have every single one of them, and this is important if the majority of the links pointing at your site are generated by you, be your most important keywords. Mix it up … and yes, use some that are not keywords and don’t … from an SEO point of view … help you out.
I may be out on a limb here, but I even like the reciprocal link for this reason … but not when it is on a page called links.html, or resources.html, but when it is from within the actual content of the site … and vice versa. Long gone are the days of reciprocal linking, and in particular, the links page. I believe links like this are natural and should exist.
The bottom line for optimization, and Ma Google won’t fight you on this one, provide valuable content that can’t be found anywhere else and that which makes your reader happy to have found your site. You’ll always win if you can do this!
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