Many businesses are so eager to get ranked in Google that they overdo it. They use aggressive SEO techniques that ultimately backfire, pushing their website further and further down the rankings.
When you overdo it with Google, they’ll push you further down the results instead of rewarding you. So in this article, I’m going to walk you through 4 “over-optimization” mistakes to avoid to ensure you don’t hurt your rankings.
1. Stuffing Keywords into Page Titles
Google looks at the title of every page, and it helps 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 not visible on the page itself, but it shows up as the blue link in Google’s search results, and you can see it in your browser tab.
(For a primer on how to find meta tags, read this article: How to find title tags and meta descriptions)
Because of the weight that Google puts on titles, a lot of people try to force their keywords repetitively into the title. I see this mistake very often when reviewing websites.
Back in the day, this type of keyword stuffing could improve your search engine rankings. These days, that tactic does not work. Instead, it can be counter-productive.
It’s important to include your keyword in the title, but if you repeat your keywords or include lots of different variations unnaturally, that can actually hurt your rankings because Google will see that as manipulative.
And here’s another way that stuffing your titles with keywords can backfire. The title is what shows up as the clickable link in Google’s search results. If you’ve just crammed a bunch of keywords in there, it’s going to look spammy. Most people are not going to click on that link if it doesn’t look like a legitimate website.
For more on how to write effective titles, read our guide on how to write title tags and meta descriptions.
2. Forcing Keywords into Your Page Copy
The second over-optimization tactic I see all the time is stuffing keywords into the actual page copy.
Stuffing keywords into the title tag is at least somewhat hidden from website visitors. But putting keywords directly into the body of the page is obviously much more noticeable.
If you force keywords into your copy, your visitors will read unnatural sentences and random keywords stuffed into the content. That looks 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. If your website content is spammy, that’s going to hurt your conversions.
Plus, if you force keywords into your 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 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.
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. This is also one of the best ways to avoid keyword cannibalization, which is when your own pages compete against each other in the search results.
4. Over-Optimized Anchor Text
When it comes to SEO, you need to build up your website’s authority.
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 approached 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, 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. This is extremely unlikely to happen naturally.
Google knows that, and this type of linking is a big red flag. 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 past decade, Google’s algorithm updates 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 years to come.
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