Having been in the online marketing industry for a few years now, I’ve often come across people and businesses that are convinced that they can do better SEO optimization than professional SEO specialists, free of charge. One mistake that these business owners and admittedly, some (not-so-professional) professional SEO companies often make, is that of over-optimizing their sites. Let’s take a closer look…

Overdoing your keyword optimization:

The very first thing everyone learns in SEO is the implementation of keyword optimization for pages and websites as a whole. Newcomers to the search engine optimization (SEO) game will learn that having the correct keywords on a page will tell search engines that the article is relevant to a particular subject that users have searched for. So the first thing they do is completely saturate their pages with relevant keywords. The problem is however, that Google and other search engines are not stupid. They can EASILY detect someone who is overdoing their SEO optimization with keyword stuffing and quickly penalize the page with low rankings and a damaged reputation.

The fact is that keyword optimization is not as easy as it seems. Each search marketing agency has a different opinion on how many keywords should be on any specific page. Only people who have experimented in SEO optimization, through the good old method of trial and error, will have a good idea of what keyword ratios work for them.

Link Building:

Another common area where people who refuse to use SEO optimization services often go wrong, is to completely overdo their link building. Once again, they learn that building links to pages is a good thing and they do everything they can to obtain links from anyone and everyone. Whether it’s internal linking or external links, search engines can pick up what is spam and what is genuine.

The old fable of “quality not quantity” comes into play when doing search engine optimization (SEO). Three good links from reputable websites can have a significantly better effect on your rankings than fifty links from a spammy link building scheme that you paid for, thinking that it would help you. The fact is that search engines evaluate the quality of each and every link on your site, and the spammier those links, the spammier your site becomes which negatively affects your search engine reputation.

Getting too creative:

I once had a client who, whilst we were doing our own SEO optimization services for his site, decided to do a little bit of his own creative SEO optimization. He figured that his site was doing well, but he wanted to appear more than once in the top 10 results in search engines, thus improving the chance of people clicking through to his site. So, he decided to duplicate his site 20 TIMES! He registered 20 different domains and launched the exact same site under different domain names. Obviously, this is MASSIVE duplicate content and breaks a whole bunch of other rules, but the fact is his site was severely penalized and the site’s reputation was also damaged.

So maybe not everyone gets this creative, but the fact is that SEO optimization specialists/professionals/experts are just that – professionals. We try and test different strategies on a daily basis and know exactly what works and what doesn’t work. If something works, we implement it on your site and you win. If you try something on your own site and it fails, you lose.

Read this blog and then read our blog on the Top 5 Reasons to hire an SEO company instead of doing it yourself, and remember that SEO is best done by people who have the knowledge, the time and most of all – the experience to do effective SEO optimization on your site.

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