If you’ve been studying dozens of ‘Search Engine Optimization’ techniques and applying them to your web pages, chances are that you are over-doing it. Like a lot of things on the web, what is true today was not true a few months or years ago. Have you been building web-sites for 2, 3 or more years? If you learned how to optimize your pages for highest rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ASK and so on, chances are you learned your craft a bit too well. The web-marketing world has evolved into a new beast in just the last 2-3 years. The SEO rules have changed.
Read through some of our older posts or pages about how to optimize websites or pages. As recent as 2006, we were telling you to build short 150-350 word, punchy, keyword stuffed pages, using each and every SEO trick conceivable (as long as it was ‘legal’ or ‘white hat’ of course). Today, you want to learn different rules. The number one rule is — don’t over-optimize!
Signs That You’ve Over-Optimized
Here are some of the signs that you’ve over-worked and over-edited your site, pages and html code:
1. Your TITLE TAG perfectly matches your H1 TAG, word for word
2. You have carefully repeated the keyword phrases from the TITLE and H1 TAGS in your H2 subheadings, with exactly the same spelling and word endings
3. You have repeated the exact keyword phrases at least 5, 6, or more times throughout your content
4. You have repeated your TITLE and H1 wording inside the ALT and TITLE TAGS of images — a dead giveaway!
5. Your links to inside-site pages are stuffed with repetitions of your keyword phrases
6. You have also stuffed keywords into off-site links
7. You have virtually no off-site links, even to related content sites
8. Your pages have long lists of similar keywords, all built around a common root that is found in your TITLE/H1 tags
9. You have repeated your main keyword phrases in the actual page name in front of the .htm or .html or .php extension ending, separated by hyphens or dashes, underscores, or perhaps all run together without spaces or dashed of any kind
10. You have created top level domains using your main keywords
11. You have created sub-domains such as ‘keywordphrase.domain.com’
12. You have placed your pages inside directories or folders which are themselves named with keywords, such as — http://keyword2.keyword1.com/keyword3/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html’
13. Your pages’ content are usually relatively short, say from 200 to 500 words
14. Every single keyword and phrase in your TITLE and/or H1 tags is featured as the leading or first-word of an H2 sub-heading
15. You have several links on other pages that use the same keywords from your TITLE tag to point into each page
Years ago, these tricks seemed the right way to ensure that your page appeared at the top of search engine search result pages for targeted keyword phrases. But things have changed. And boy-oh-boy have they changed!
How Automatic Search Engine Optimization Changed the Web
What happened is that Google began to notice that millions and millions of pages began to show up around the web with high ‘relevancy scores’ for millions of keywords. The proliferation of SEO businesses and ‘web marketing experts’ began to average-up the relevancy contest. Millions of us began to understand how to write pages and design web-sites that were extremely keyword dense and potentially high-ranked for target phrases. The web itself was evolving into an optimized medium. Search engines’ job of finding out which page was the most relevant for any particular search was getting harder and harder.
To make matters worse, at first dozens, then hundreds, and nowadays thousands of automatic page-optimizing software programs appeared. There were plugins and scripts that worked so well that even an amateur could build truly focused, highly dense keyword stuffed pages.
Even though these simple techniques were innocent enough and ‘white hat’, when they began to spread throughout the web, they ended up producing a world where there were very few stand-outs.
Picture a world where everyone wears a crown of jewels and gold. Which one is the King?
Producing Sites and Pages That Win Today’s New Relevancy SEO Rules
Think of the web the way Google and the other web crawler robots see it. With so many crowns, who is the king for any particular search term? Which site wins the ranking and gets listed in the top-10 search results, or maybe even in the top-5?
What SEO Techniques Work Now?
Here are our best guesses about what seems to be working now, in early 2008:
1. Never repeat exactly the same keywords, in the same order, in your TITLE and H1 tags
2. Use similar words, and words that have different endings of the root keywords in your H2 and H3 sub-headings
3. Make your pages considerably larger. Small pages used to look better to the search engine crawlers, since the old robots could crawl them faster. Also they used to appear more dense for each of the main keywords. These factors have changed. The web as a whole is bigger. You need more content to compete with other pages for each of your keywords. Pages with thousands of words work better in today’s over-optimized, keyword-dense relevancy game. And, the search engines are themselves faster and more efficient. They can handle your bigger, richer, longer pages. Content-content-content. The SE robots are hungry for it!
4. Be sure to point several of your on-site links into each of your pages. Don’t use the same keywords in each link. Make them different, so they appear natural and organic. Put these links inside paragraphs of appropriate content. Avoid long lists of links.
5. Build more keyword-appropriate links to inside pages of your site from other sites that are themselves related by subject matter to your site. Be sure these links are not repeated from site to site. Make each one different, and place them inside of a related-content paragraph if possible.
6. Never build pages that obey ALL of the SEO rules we’ve listed at the top of this article. If your pages look too perfect, they will be considered as artificial, SEO traps. If they do show up in the SERPs (search engine ranking positions), they will be listed near the bottom. This is especially true for short pages, and pages with low on-site internal links and few or no off-site inbound links pointing into them.
7. The ideal page will look like this: A long page with at least 1,000 or more words, several relevant inbound off-site links using different keywords for each link, several internal links also using different keywords located inside relevant content paragraphs, no ‘keyword stuffing’ tricks like keyword filled ALT or TITLE tags inside IMAGE tags, and no more than a couple of the main keywords used in the URL of the page (including page name, folder or directory, sub-domain, and the top level domain). Highly ranked winning pages in today’s web marketing world will be well-written, properly spelled, grammatically correct pages with 100% unique, fresh content.
8. Today’s successful pages with be manually written, not auto-generated garbage.
Follow those rules and you’ll be near the top for your new pages. However, as you may have noticed, that means that you’ll be doing a lot of writing, and rewriting.
Momma never said it would be easy!
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Contributor's Note
Google engineers, when you can find one, are often quoted as saying something like "...just build good pages" to web-site copywriters and developers. Can it really be that simple? Yes. Build 'em. They will come.
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