Over Optimizing Your Site: Just Say No - Practices to Avoid
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According to Murray, good practices start with your domain name. Pick a domain name that is short and easy to read. Something like http://keyword-keyword-
keyword-keyword.com is going to be hard for your visitors to remember, difficult to read, and look like spam.
Another area you need to take a close look at is your title tags. These are heavily susceptible to keyword stuffing. Don’t go there. Remember that your title tags are going to show up in the SERPs, so potential visitors will see them. Title tags that are stuffed with keywords turn off web surfers. If search engine users take one look and decide not to click through to your site, they surely won’t convert. Murray suggests that you “pick one or two search terms and call it a day” when writing title tags.
You should also avoid keyword stuffing in your content. How much is too much? Estimates vary; some SEOs stick with three percent, while others say as high as seven percent is okay. Certainly once you hit 10 percent or higher, you will set off alarms with the search engines. Never mind the search engines, the humans you’re trying to reach will find the content difficult to read. You could benefit from using tools such as Keyword Cloud and Keyword Density here on the SEO Chat website to see whether you’re venturing into dangerous territory.
Yet another area you want to watch carefully is your links. Yes, you want to collect plenty of backlinks, since both Yahoo and Google reward backlinks to varying degrees. But you don’t want to collect them too quickly, and you really want to pay attention to where you get these links from. By this I mean you need to watch the quality of your links (avoid link farms!), and, especially with Google’s Big Daddy update, you want to make sure that your links are relevant to your site.
I mentioned content in the previous section. Real content is great, and your users will love you for it, but there are certain content issues you want to avoid. One of these is duplicate content. What is duplicate content? It is when the content of one page of your site is exactly the same as the content of another page on your site (or another page on a site closely related to the original site). I have seen webmasters claim it is an urban legend that Google penalizes for duplicate content, but do you really want to take that chance?
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