Is your website Over-Optimized?

Many of us have heard about Over Optimization, many of us have experienced it. So what is Over Optimization and how to avoid it?

The most frequent Over Optimization mistake is too high Keyword Density, proximity and frequency. This means that you Overstuff your page with keywords. Therefore to avoid keyword Over Optimization one should use keyword density analyzing software

The second mistake is Over linking –a situation where you put too many inbound links to your site and get sandboxed. To avoid this mistake try to increase quantity of links “naturally”.

The third big mistake is Over Optimization in anchor text - Overstuffing of anchor text with keywords. It is probably the same to keyword density and almost all analyzing software includes anchor text in check.

If you Over-Optimize your web pages, chances are that your website rankings might drop because your site has been purposefully designed for search engines and not for web surfers which according to Google is unnatural.

How to Combat the Effects of Over Optimization?
Like anything else in life, the problems that Over Optimization bring to your site can be overcome by attending to specific techniques like these to make sure your online business garners further success. Here Are Four Ways to Combat the Effects of Over Optimization on Your Website:

1. GET RID OF YOUR WEB PAGES THAT ARE KEYWORD STUFFED
Including a keyword or phrase any more than 10% of your total text in one of your website's articles is considered "keyword stuffing". For instance, if you include the word "Microsoft" as a keyword in your text that only has a total of 500 words, but you put "Microsoft" in the page fifty times (10%) then the text won't even make any sense to a human being, much less a search engine looking Over your web page for possible inclusion in Google. You must remove "Microsoft" from your content so that it is used no more than a rate of 7% of the total text in your web page.

2. DELETE UNWANTED KEYWORDS AND REPLACE THEM IN THE BEST POSSIBLE AREAS ON YOUR WEB PAGES
For great search engine Optimization to really work, most of your keywords should be included in your title, headings and in the first paragraphs on your main home page. If you have a page that has a higher density percentage for an overly used keyword, then you should replace those keywords with synonyms. Also, never put your keywords in bold or italic, as that will not look natural to the reader, and will not do a thing to boost your ranking score with the search engines.

3. DELETE ALL "DOORWAY PAGES" FROM YOUR WEB PAGES
A doorway page is essentially a page built not for humans to read, but instead is used for the sole purpose of getting search engines to rank that page higher, thereby giving your entire site a higher ranking. A similar tactic that SEO companies are known to indulge in is creating "hidden text", which are keywords that are embedded in the HTML code of the page. These techniques are nothing more than cheap manipulation "black hat" tricks, so if your site is using any of these cheap tricks on your main pages, get rid of them now.

4. DUPLICATE CONTENT IS DEFINITELY NOT A GOOD THING
Duplicate text on your site could have been put there by a mistake, and if it is in there you are risking a much lower rating in the search engines the longer you let it stay on your web pages. Duplicate content is defined by having the same text used on one page as it is on another different page on the same exact site. This effect can even be brought on by your "sister site" that is linked to your main site, or if you happen to be linked to a very similar site that has almost exactly the same text as your main web page has. There are many software tools available to you so you can check for this kind of bad link, so I would highly recommend you do so immediately if you do own more than one other site similar to your main one.

5. THE LINKING FACTOR
When Optimizing your website for a high ranking in Google, most SEO specialists will always recommend including a lot of links to larger websites to help with a higher overall rank for your business. But having too many outbound links and not enough inbound links can destroy your chances of getting a high search engine rank. You should always have more inbound links coming from credible websites than the ones you have outgoing to Disreputable ones. Here's what do if you are caught in the worst case scenario of Over Optimization

How can Google find out that a web site is Over-Optimized?
Google has an algorithm that detects Over-Optimized websites. The detected websites are down ranked in the Google search results. This Over-Optimization filter in Google’s ranking algorithm is also called the "-950 penalty" because that is what usually happens to Over-Optimized web pages: they are down ranked to 950 positions. Google’s anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts published a video in which he also mentions Over-Optimization as a reason for ranking problems.