SEO and Over Optimization

In the world of online marketing,  SEO (search engine optimization) is what we call the process of making sure a web site is coded and arranged in a Google friendly way, so that when it is crawled and indexed, it ranks as highly for the keywords you have chosen as possible. 

Ranking highly is important – so important, in fact, that an entire
industry has sprung up from this need. There are now companies whose sole purpose is to optimize client sites for the best rankings in search engine results. These companies do not actually have anything more than you do, except time.  SEO is very time consuming because what the search engines “like” to see changes frequently.  Case in point:  just last week, a new Google search algorithm update referred to as “the Son of Panda” by many people has rendered some of last year’s most successful SEO techniques nearly useless.  Many of the old ways are now bringing penalties to web sites that once benefited greatly for using them.  SEO companies save the day by constantly researching new ways of optimizing web sites for SERPs (search engine result pages) and monitoring changes like the one Google just made, since most of us don’t have time to keep a constant watch on such things.  We are simply too busy conducting business.

What did Google do last week, exactly?  They have begun a process that helps them to detect when a site has been “over optimized” for SEO – meaning that the site has had very systematic coding and content applied to it for one reason only: ranking highly in search engines.  In
other words, if the content is not real and genuine, then Google doesn’t want that turning up in search results, Google wants its results to remain valuable and viable, and the only way to insure that is by keeping SEO generated content out of the top results pages, so that people can find truly relevant information when they conduct a simple search. 


To find out whether your site is over optimized, it would be a good idea to contact a local SEO company or individual contractor to conduct a site audit and help you find out where you stand. 


This article was written by Melanie M, who loves to blog
about technology, SEO, and Direct TV.