SEO overkill can hinder the credibility and success of a website. The following answers the question: what is SEO overkill?
SEO is essential for the success of a website. It increases search engine rankings and user traffic. Thus, SEO is both important and beneficial to a website. Unfortunately, the need for SEO has lead to cases of SEO overkill.
What is SEO Overkill?
Ignoring SEO is detrimental to a website; however, too much SEO is just as damaging. SEO overkill occurs when excessive SEO techniques are used to SEO a website. If you attempt to rush SEO it can make your site look like spam. Your site can be excluded from search engine results and will then lose visitor traffic.
Why Have a Website?
Think about the reasons why you have a website. You need a website to advertise or sell your product. Online revenue increases if you have online visitors. If you have limited visitor traffic it limits your online revenue. Optimising your site for SEO increases your rank on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and visitor traffic. However, there is a fine line between optimising a site and pleasing online visitors. If your site only focuses on SEO, visitors will leave your site and not return. If your site is designed only for online visitors, search engine "spiders" will ignore your site.
Avoiding SEO Overkill
It is difficult to find the balance between too little and too much SEO, both of which can hinder a website's success. If unethical or excessive SEO techniques are used search engines will "crawl" past your site or mark it as spam. On the other hand, if visitors log onto your site and notice repetitive keywords or errors it will lose credibility. Avoid SEO overkill, otherwise, your site will look like spam and lose credibility.
SEO Overkill Techniques
The following indicates SEO techniques that can lead to SEO overkill, these include:
- Using too many keywords.
- Using too many keyword phrases.
- Repeating too many keywords.
- Repeating the same keywords in the page, folder and domain name.
- Having a keyword density of over 10%, opposed to 3-5%.
- Making the title tags too long.
- Making tag descriptions too long.
- Overstuffing keywords in tags or small areas of text.
- Writing content only for search engine "spiders"
- Forgetting to write content for the user.
- Creating duplicate content on your site.
- Submitting duplicate content on sister websites.
- Using the same content on other sites that you own.
- Using hidden text (where text is not seen by the user, as it has background colours).
- Using multiple hyphens in domain names.
- Placing capitals in the domain name when it is not necessary.
- Receiving backlinks from spam websites, blacklisted websites or link farms.
- Having website errors.
- Having spelling mistakes on the site.
- Not including a call to action for the user.
- Using unethical SEO techniques.
Conclusion
SEO overkill hinders the credibility and success of a website. Just as search engine "spiders" mark an over SEOed site as spam, online users will not view it as credible. A site should rather be well designed with SEO in mind. This will optimise the site, while encouraging users to return or be converted to sales. A site will then appeal to the user, while having SEO friendly features.
Further Articles
