The Effects of Over Optimizing a Website.
Jul 04 2009
Posted by George as Search Engine Optimization
The optimization of a website has changed very much since 2-4 years back. During those days you might not have enough competition and you came to the tops of the search engine results page without doing much work. A slight SEO on your sight would have made you to the top of the SERPs. But time has changed more and more websites have come to the fore, and hence the competition has also increased for your keywords. So these days when you do SEO you try to optimize it more when compared to the SEO that you used to do 2-3 years back. Certain SEOs try each and everything possible to bring their site on to the top position. But the major thing that I have notices is that the sites which are overly optimized tend to loose the battle and loses its popularity.
So the question is whether over optimization of your site results in any kind of penalty from the search engines? As per Matt Cutts there is nothing like an over optimization penalty in Google, but over optimization can make your site look spammy. Google hasn’t so far penalized any website for over optimization, but websites has losed its popularity among its users for over optimization. For example if your over optimizing your site with keywords, such as using them more than usual in Title tags, Meta tags, Alt Tags, content etc, it would sometime end as an annoying factor to the users. Even though if you rank on the top, the users would not be comfortable with this over optimization and your sites looks junky or scammy to the users.
In my experience over optimization of a site has always lead to some issues and resulted in the site losing its popularity and In my experience over optimization of a site has always lead to some issues and resulted in the site losing its popularity and traffic. If your content is over optimized with keywords, the users find it uncomfortable with going through the content, and content appear spammy to them. So the best thing to do is to come back to the basics, include keywords in a moderate way and make the site more user friendly. If the search enigines your website the most appropriate for certain keyword, no one can stop you from making your site appear on the top of SERP. Relevancy is the key for better search engine rankings and if your site is relevant to your major keywords, you dont have to worry too much.
Organic Traffic and Paid Traffic are the two factors that helps in bringing traffic to your site. These things are one of the main factors that webmasters and website owners are more concerned of these days. Before going into the details let me first introduce you to the terms Organic and Paid traffic.
Organic Traffic : Organic Traffic is the traffic that our site gets through the natural searches through search engines. This is very cheap in terms of cost and also takes a bit of time for your site to be visible in the search engines get traffic from them. An example of organic traffic is given below.
For example, consider you are a shoe manufacturer in California and you own a website. When people search for “shoe manufacturer” in the search engine, consider that your site is coming in the top 10 list. When someone click on your link on the search engine and enters your site, you are indeed getting an Organic Traffic. In order to get you website on the top page of the search engine for a particular keyword, your website has to be well optimized for various search engines. Once you site get neatly optimized you are bound to get organic traffic for a long period of time, i.e 6 months to one year. You don’t have any additional extra costs rather than the initial optimization phase. Organic traffic is the best way to drive traffic to your site and is widely adopted by website owners all over the world.
Paid Traffic : Paid Traffic is the other type of traffic that come to your site, by paying for every traffic that comes. Paid traffic is recommended for those who needs instant traffic for their site and does not have the time for organic traffic to happen. Paid traffic is the major essence of Search Engine Marketing and it requires proper planning and strategy to execute the paid traffic technique. There are many forms of paid traffic like paying for search engines to get listed, banner advertisement and other forms of advertisement where you need to pay for getting traffic.
For Example, consider you have a new business site and you don’t have the time to wait for the organic For Example, consider you have a new business site and you don’t have the time to wait for the organic traffic. Here you need instant traffic from the search engines, say Google. So you have to go for the Google Adwords PPC, which is the most popular form of paid traffic. Here you pay for Google to get listed on the sponsored links in the Google search engine results page (SERP). When somebody clicks on your link you have to pay Google a certain amount and as a result you would be gaining instant traffic, but you have to maintain your monthly budget so as to continue getting the paid traffic.
Last few weeks has seen som many changes in the search engine world. These includes the announcement of Google Wave, the replacement of Microsoft’s Live with Bing, the end of Yahoo’s Geocities and Yahoo 360. These all things sends a feeling that the search engine optimization field is changing somehow.
The search engines has been there for almost last 10 years and we have seen a lot of changes since then. In the early years we were new to the search engines and were amazed at the results that the search engine produced. But over the times, search engine have evolved to a higher level, with Google leading the way and remaining at the helm for over a decade. Whenever anyone things of searching something on the net, the first name that comes into the mind is ‘Google’.
In the earlier days people used search engines to search something on the net, or search for some informations. But now it has changed rapidly and apart from searching stuffs on the net, people are using search engine for even taking decisions and other calculations. The search engine efficiency and its algorithms has become more complex and major search engines are trying too harder to stay in the top search engine brackets. Till some time back no search engine were comfortably able to read and crawl the text on the flash files and certain Javasripts. But Google has somewhat broken that jinx and has thrown more challenges to its competitors.
These all facts have brought the Search Engine (SEO) Professionals to work harder and stay up to date with the changing algorithms and tools. But in my opnion even with these advancements of the Search Engine algorithms the basics of SEO has not changed. The basic of the search engine optimization still remains the same, but the style of doing it has changed. So every SEO professional should be well equipped to adapt to these technological advancements.
The basic of SEO is to build a search engine friendly website structure and a good keyword research, so that the website does not perform badly in the search engine results page (SERP). The process of link building is also the same and does not have changed too much. The main thing that differentiates the SEO of today form the SEO techniques that was implemented a few years back is the introduction of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Social Media Optimization includes the process of getting traffic from certain social media sites which works purely on Web 2.0 platform. SMO mainly focuses includes user participation and loyality, and is also a major source of link building.
So in a nutshell if you stick to your SEO basics and get updated with the latest techniques, you would not find too much changes in the process of SEO.
