1. Stuffing
Keywords into Page Titles
Google looks at the
title of every page, and it helps to tell Google what your page is
about. Your titles have a major impact on how your pages will rank in
Google.
In case you’re not
familiar, your title is part of the code of each page. It’s actually
not visible on the webpage itself, but if you open up a browser, in the
upper left-hand corner of that browser, you’ll see the title of the
page.
(For a primer on how to
find meta tags, read this article: How to find title tags and
meta descriptions)
Because of the weight
Google puts on titles, a lot of people try to force their keywords
repetitively in the title. I see this mistake very often when I’m
reviewing websites.
Back in the day, this
type of keyword stuffing could improve your search engine rankings. But
these days, that tactic does not work as well. Instead, it can be
counter-productive.
It’s important to
include your keyword in the title, but if you repeat your keywords a
lot or include lots of different variations unnaturally, that can
actually hurt your search engine rankings because Google will see that
as manipulative.
And here’s another way
that stuffing your titles with keywords can backfire…
The title is actually
what shows up in the search results – it’s the blue underlined link in
Google’s search results. And if you’ve just put a lot of keywords as
the title, then when somebody does search, and your website shows up,
then that’s going to look pretty spammy.
I know, personally, I’m
not going to click on that link if it doesn’t look like a legitimate
website.
2. Forcing
Keywords into Your Webpage Copy
The second
over-optimization tactic I see all the time is stuffing keywords into
the actual webpage copy.
Before, I was talking
about stuffing keywords into the title. From a website visitor’s
standpoint, you could sort of fly under the radar stuffing keywords
into your title tag, because most people actually don’t notice that
when they’re on your website.
But putting keywords
directly into the body of the webpage is obviously much more noticeable
to your website visitors.
If you force keywords
into your copy, your website visitors will read unnatural sentences and
random keywords stuffed into the content. That looks really spammy, and
it can be counter-productive for your ultimate marketing goals.
After all, what’s the
goal of SEO anyway?
It’s not just rankings.
And it’s not just traffic either. The ultimate goal of SEO should be to
generate leads and sales. And if your website content is spammy, that
could really hurt your website conversions.
Plus, if you force
keywords into your website copy, Google will see that as unnatural and
spammy as well. And that can hurt your search engine rankings. So it’s
just not a good idea.
3. Creating
Near-Duplicate Pages Purely For SEO
Imagine you’re a
dentist, and you wanted to rank for the keyword phrase “New York City
dentist.” You might create a page on your website focused around that
keyword phrase, right? Maybe you’d optimize your homepage for that
phrase.
But then, you might
decide you’d also like to rank for a similar phrase like “Manhattan
dentist.” And so, maybe you’d create a page for that keyword phrase
too.
And so on, and so on.
Creating those
near-duplicate pages used to work OK years ago…
But not today.
Google has gotten
smarter at figuring out that a lot of different keywords are synonyms
with the same search intent.
You don’t need to have
two different pages for New York City dentist and Manhattan dentist
because Google understands that’s the same search, so they’ll display
the same results for that.
Instead of creating
near-duplicate pages for different synonyms, you should group your
keywords into topics, and then create the best page you can for each
topic.
4.
Over-Optimized Anchor Text
When it comes to SEO,
you need to build up your website’s authority.
And a major factor in
your website’s authority is the quantity and quality of links from
other websites that are linking to your website. You can basically
think of a link from another website as a vote in your favor.
Every link to your
website has what’s called anchor text, which is the
clickable text. This anchor text helps Google understand what a
particular page is about.
Again, imagine you’re a
dentist based in Manhattan, and you want to get your website ranking at
the top of Google for “New York City dentist.”
Wouldn’t it be great if
lots of websites linked to your website with the anchor text New York
City dentist? That would help you reach the top of Google for that
phrase.
And so, that’s how a
lot of companies have approach SEO for years. They would go out and
build tons of links with identical or very similar anchor text.
When we’re conducting
an SEO audit, we’ll take a look at a website’s link profile, and see
how many links they have and where they’re coming from, and the anchor
text of those links.
Often, we find that
websites have very highly-concentrated anchor text, with almost all the
incoming links containing the same keyword phrases. Well, this is
extremely unlikely to happen naturally!
Google knows that, and
increasingly, this type of linking has become a big red flag to Google.
When Google sees this, they know you are trying to manipulate the
search results. As a result, taking this approach with your SEO can do
more harm than good over the long-term.
Over the years,
Google’s Penguin updates and “unnatural link” penalties have been
focused on devaluing (or penalizing) these unnatural linking schemes.
So you should avoid building links to your website with
overly-concentrated anchor text.
If you’re in business
for the long-term (which I hope you are!), then it makes sense to take
a long-term approach to SEO. By avoiding these 4 mistakes, you’ll stay
on Google’s good side and protect your rankings for the long-term.
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