Over Optimisation – Don’t do too much SEO!

About a month ago Google dropped a hint that they will be looking into penalising websites that are over optimised. Lots of people have speculated what this means and when it could happen. We have kept quiet on the subject until we had seen some movement on this. Although we haven’t seen anything negative movement for our clients websites there is a lot of talk about other sites out there which might have been affected.

So what to do and what’s it all about? Well Google have been drumming into us for quite a while that they want quality content which is for the reader, and not for Google’s robot to find keywords on the page. We think they will be continuing on this theme. Make changes to the following areas of your site by making them for the reader:

Title tag: One of the biggest signals (at the moment) for the search engines is the Title tag, we recommend not to stuff your title with keywords. This is the most important line for your site in the search results, therefore use it cleverly and sell your service or product.

Keyword Stuffing: If you have some content on your site purely to get your keywords on to the page, we recommend removing it before this update happens. Replace it with useful content which readers will want to read, if you write the content well you might be able to include one or two of the keywords you removed. But write it for the reader, not Google’s robot.

Internal Linking: Many people still think having every one of your keywords written on a page should link out to the relevant page. To Google this looks like you have purposely added these links into the content to send link value to the internal page, this doesn’t fool Google. The most important internal link for the keyword is the first one, therefore don’t do anymore than one. We are not saying don’t have internal links, in fact the opposite as they are very important. But you really only need one internal link per keyword on a page, if you are using a plugin that automatically creates links from your keywords we recommend removing it.

Apr 25, 2012 – Update

As if by magic a few hours after we posted the above blog Google had announced that they will be changing their algorithm within the next 3 days. Google’s full statement is here.

Here is a quote:

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at web-spam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.

If you require assistance with your website get in touch!

We hope this help, if you have anything to add or any questions just ask and we will try our best to answer.

How does Google decide which website ranks for each keyword?

Wouldn’t we all like to know the answer to that question?

However Google’s Matt Cutts have made a video which gives you an in site of roughly how Google’s search engines works. He gives you a few little hints on what you should have on your page to help it rank well. Instead of us just repeating what he has said why not watch the video instead, it is worth the time.

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Is your website over optimised?

Over the last couple of weeks Google have made some fairly big changes to their algorithm, one of these is that your website might be given a penalty if it is ‘over optimised’. That’s right this is a bit of a ‘game changer’ to coin a phrase.

So what can you do about it?

Here are a few bullet points (the way we like to display our tips to you, quick and easy to read):

Remove links to your site from footers or site-wide links.
If your webpage has stuffed keywords, cut them down. You only really need to mention the keyword once or twice max.
Are you linking out from every keyword on your page? Stop it and just do it once.
Stop focusing on your keywords but more on words related to your keywords.

So what can you do?

Content, write unique quality content. It doesn’t have to be war and peace but something good.
Make sure your content is for the reader, not for the search engines.
Use spell check, typos happen to the best of us so use this handy tool.

A list of the important changes to Google Algorithm in March for SEO are here, we will be creating another one for April too. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook to be alerted or use our RSS feed.

Anchor Text, your days are numbered!

There is a lot of talk about anchor text at the moment, is it still useful and does it still provide any SEO value? Could it hurt your site now instead of helping it?

Well until we hear from Google themselves we can only speculate.

So what is anchor text?

Anchor text are the words that you use to create a link from. For example the anchor text here is ‘Does Googles +1 button help SEO’: Does Google +1 button help SEO

We still believe anchor text is still useful but the signal to Google is not as important.
We recommend varying the anchor text as much as possible, don’t just have the same keyword on every link.
Include the odd ‘click here’ as that is something a human would write naturally.
Answer questions for example: Is mobile SEO important to my business?

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Googles 50 changes for March

Google have once again released a list of changes they have made to their search algorithm. As usual it is a little vague in places so there is an element of reading between the lines. I have gone through these changes and bullet-pointed the major ones which could affect search engine optimisation. If you would like to read the original post from Google it is here.

Freshness – Google have ‘improved’ the algorithm (Panda update) to favour sites that are updated more recently. Our tip is to add a social media feed to the site or keep updating the content (only if relevant) to ensure it is fresh.
Changes to image searches – Changes have been made to searching images to find relevant images (not site) for your search. If your site is ranked on page 3 for the keyword it doesn’t mean an image on your site is also. If it is relevant to the keyword it could be on the first page. If you are not optimising images you should be, get in touch we can help, either on Twitter, Facebook or Email.
Tweaking of Anchor text – Google have made changes to the value of the anchor text. They obviously haven’t said what the changes are but we advise to vary your anchor text and also use similar words; ie: if your keyword is ‘garden furniture’ a similar anchor text could be ‘turf for lawn’.
Updates to UI for mobiles – Changes have been made for mobile devices searching for Apps, they have basically made the results easier to read on smaller screens incorporating app icons, star ratings, prices and download buttons. It’s not just sites selling Apps that need to optimise their sites for mobile devices, ALL sites should be. We have more information on search engine optimisation for mobile devices here.
Improvement to detect the quality of a site – They have made changes to how they decide if the site is of quality. This is very very vague, this could mean the quality of the content, the links to it or something completely different.
Update to personalisation signals – Google have updated their algorithm which personalises search results. Tip – If you are not using Google+ yet, time to get on board!
Removal of ‘stale’ pages – Once again changes which favour fresh content, fewer stale pages will shown up in search results.
Improve the date detection on Blogs and Forums – They have improved it, that’s it! If your blog or forum has seen ranking changes this could be involved.
Expanded sitelinks for mobile devices – Google have recently launched expanded sitelinks for mobiles, we have an up and coming blog post on this subject soon. We will shout on Twitter/Facebook when it is online.

There you have it!