It’s always good to be proactive.
However, too much can be an interference.
You could end up overcorrecting your work by so much, that you would be undoing all the progress you’ve made. In some cases, you could actually be worse off than before you started.
The same can be said, and it’s principles apply, for those interested in SEO.
Focusing too heavily on SEO and making modifications to your strategy can actually be harmful for the online traffic you hope to bring in.
It sounds uncommon, but these Optimization Traps are all too real to ignore. Here are some traps you may not want to fall victim to:
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1. A common mistake that many make is optimizing the same page(s) over and over again. A great number of people falsely believe that there can never too much attentiveness to the pages you publish online. However, if you’re checking and editing your work on a daily basis, you may be doing yourself a disservice.
Again, it is common. Some of the best in the business used to do this. They would tweak and tinker endlessly, and a site’s approach to optimization would seemingly change every night for a week.
This might have been sustainable a few years ago, but the algorithms are dramatically different these days. In fact, the algorithms change just about as often as those changes that we’re telling you not to make.
Google makes over eight algorithms changes a day (on average), and the edits to your SEO tactics may not even be enough to keep up.
When you make changes at such a rapid pace, you are actually robbing yourself of the knowledge you were hoping to get out of such an experiment. You would be unaware of what changes are hurting you, as you are not offering enough time for the algorithm to settle in with the manual changes you’ve made to your work. If anything, you are delaying the onset of information that could actually be of help to you if you just wait patiently.
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2. Another common misconception is that all changes help boost rankings. This is not true. Not every change has the potential to boost your rankings; as a matter of fact, some of the structural changes to your site that would increase your traffic aren’t even relevant to SEO.
It’s all about testing new strategies. Never push your luck and abandon all ethical guidelines by buying links; this is not what we’re recommending. Some variables that do deserve attention, however, could be the land speed optimization. Analytics of this could help you beef up the parts of your site that need it. Another example is the hosting of non-static content on CDN, or a “a network of servers in different geographic locations working together to get content to load faster by serving it from a location near the visitor.”
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3. There is a great deal of trial and error, and you need to wait until you can observe and record the impact of your optimization techniques. It’s never smart to patch up a tire until you’re absolutely sure where all the leaks are coming from. Roughly, this process could take about a month.
Remain calm!
Patience is a virtue here, and will be rewarded with the information you need to steadily improve your site’s performance. Sometimes it could take even longer, but the slower and the steadier win the race. You need to let the results set in.
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4. Like we’ve said, OVER-optimization can hurt your rankings. One such way that this happens is through the use of keyword-rich anchors. These anchors, for both internal and external links, can damage your chances of being seen (depending on how you use them)
You have to remember. You’re dumping, and Google can sense it. Advanced search engines like Google are smart enough weed out the blatantly obvious.
For example, a page selling snow tires that overcrowds its content with “snow tires” is asking to be blacklisted from normal viewing. Instead, helpful indicators like “learn more” or “click here” register really well. Even related information, like the brand names of the tires, help to move the search along. It’s much more natural, and Google will prioritize that content simply for doing more of its job in providing the information requested.
Another helpful tip is to constantly be rotating out your anchor text. Speaking naturally is the name of the game. The actual search phrase isn’t even always needed, so long as the user is being helped. The customers you hope to acquire in online traffic are people, too. Educated and wary, just like yourself.
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5. Another technique that people over-utilize is building only internal links to the same pages. Yes, the majority of your links should be internal, but it’s an unrealistic goal for larger websites. You’d also reap the benefit of passing along good “ju-ju” to other sites, and that synergy finds its way back to you in the long run.
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6. It’s best to end on this: Try to avoid repetition of the same focus keywords. Repeating keywords over and over again just becomes senseless clutter, and it ultimately works against you. Ranking for a term does not mean mentioning it five to ten times in the body paragraphs of your content. Google doesn’t consider keyword density.
Remember: These engines take into account the BEST experiences for the user, and they do this with an interface called LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). They know when people are reading content, clicking through prompts, and satisfying themselves with the results of their search.
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Bonus: Don’t build your links too fast. Numbers won’t beat the odds, and it certainly doesn’t make up for the work that could be brought in with manual outreach. If you build links too fast, the engine will sense that something unnatural is occurring.