Commonly Overused SEO Techniques

There are several commonly overused SEO techniques that doesn’t provide much benefit to your website and sometimes even  has the negative effect of reversing SEO.

1. Keyword Density in Content (Keyword Stuffing)

It’s important to make sure that you have keywords in your content but beware of overdoing it. When you have too many keywords stuffed into a small area, it becomes keyword stuffing. Not only is purposeful overstuffing of your content degrading for your writing quality, it also recieves many negative SEO effects as bots generally think that someone is trying to get around the system.

Generally, as long as your writing/content sounds fluid and sounds like something written for people, it should be fine. If optimal keyword density and placement really is very important for you, you may wish to hire a SEO firm.

2. Keyword Stuffed Titles

Titles in keywords are good, but many people overdo it. This form of keyword stuffing is creating long tiles that use subdivision for sections such as:

• Webmaster Apex > WebHosting Reviews > Bluehost > Promotion > 50$ Off > Best Web Hosting

This is totally unnecessary and you may be punished for it. From practice, most people find that the first ten or so letters are the most important for an SEO-friendly page title.

3. Thinking More is Better

More content (a.k.a. more topics and articles) is good but thinking really long articles or abysmally long blocks of text will create more page relevancy is totally wrong.

Actually, the first two hundred characters of code on a page generally seem to hold the most weight. Of course, this is an approximation, but the key aspects of your content that you wish to convey will probably be best put in the front.

Note* With the two hundred character point of reference in mind, try to keep your header short and concise so the main body of your content stands out in search engines.

4. Submissions (Directories and Search Engines)

Once upon a time, all you had to do well in search engine placement was to have lots of keywords and meta tags, and then submit your website to a ton of directories and search engines. Fortunately or unfortunately, this no longer works.

Submissions are often overused as there is a very limited number of good submissions such as DMOZ or BOTW. Submitting too much shouldn’t hurt you but your time is probably better spent elsewhere.

Admittedly, being indexed by major search engines is important, but major search engines will generally pick up your website within a month so your time is better spent creating content. Trust me, getting indexed earlier is pointless as you’re highly unlikely to get much organic traffic when you start out.

Directories are a different matter. Some directories are truly beneficial to you. These are generally the manually edited directories that may either be paid or free. You shouldn’t expect traffic from directories, but a link from a good directory may provide huge SEO benefits.