How to Prevent Your Content from Being Over-Optimized
Hot buttered popcorn and chocolate ice cream may be tasty treats, but only in moderation. The same is true with SEO. While it’s good to optimize your content, over-indulging with keywords or sprinkling too many links throughout your content may catch the attention of Google in a bad way. An experienced San Diego optimization firm shares a few tips on how to avoid over-optimizing your content.
Use Different Link Types
Internal and external links are good, but you need to have a balance. Spread your links out. Although it’s tempting to have everything point back to your homepage, a healthy link profile has links that point to deep internal links (the ones on other pages within your site). Make sure to check who’s actually linking back to your site. If you have a bunch of backlinks from shady sites, Google may penalize you. The search engine also doesn’t like excessive footer links, so don’t worry about optimizing here or stuffing keywords in.
Write for Humans First
If you’re constantly thinking, “Oh, wait, I need a keyword here,” as you prepare content, you’ll likely find yourself over-optimizing. Instead, write for the actual human searchers who would want to read your content first, and worry about identifying natural keywords or keyword phrases later. Also avoid:
- Keyword-rich anchors for internal links
- Non-relevant keywords
- Keyword jumbles (multiple keywords in the same paragraph)
- Creating a URL just because of its keyword
Don’t Overdo It with H1 Headers
H1 headers are good, but they can adversely affect your SEO if you get carried away. Limit your use of H1 headers to one per page and mix things up with H2, H3, and H4 headers throughout the rest of the content.
Over-optimizing can also happen if you’ve been regularly adding keywords and links without cleaning your content first. If your website, blog, or social media pages have been around for a while, call Saba SEO to clean your SEO clutter. Apart from offering tailored SEO support, our team can go through your older content to remove keywords that are no longer relevant and links that aren’t related to your current content. Call us at 858-951-1717 to create a customized plan to optimize your site.