Can you do too much SEO?
SEO is a funny old thing. Some elements will work better than others; some changes you make will see you climb the ranks others will see no effect at all or, worse still, a drop.
To see a drop in direct response to SEO work is extremely rare though. Unless you have somehow broken the rules of Google, maybe by getting a bad link, or have ruined your content, any change should be beneficial.
Let’s take your link profile as a good example. If you employ ethical link building practices then there can be no damage done to your site’s ranking. Of course if you do stray over onto the dark side and buy a link, get involved in a link farm or start inter-linking with some dodgy characters, then you might do more damage than good.
But if you’re just going after directories, forums, blog comments and articles, there’s not a lot that can go wrong. Okay, so you aren’t going to immediately jump a dozen places or so thanks to one article submission, but as with everything in SEO, it is a gradual process. You need to build, not bulldoze.
Taking another viewpoint, your content is also hugely important in determining where your site ranks. Leaving aside (but acknowledging the importance of) audience interaction, content is what search engines feed off to understand a site’s meaning. We all know that they like to index new content, but that doesn’t mean that you have to re-write your homepage every day.
If your content is optimised and appears to be working for customers too, it might be best to leave well alone. You can always write something better, but you could also lose that vital balance between optimisation and conversions. If you do want to try out new content, it might be best to implement some split testing. This way you won’t make any rash decisions and can accurately determine what works well – for your audience at least.
The only time content and SEO can go too far is when you start filling cracks with keywords. Don’t just try to lever in a few more in an effort to improve rankings. If your content isn’t optimised, then re-write it to ensure that it is. Bad content only gets worse when you overlook context in favour of keywords.
The same can be true for Meta and headers. Your H1 header should include your key term for the page and not a lot else. Your headers further down the page should add context for a reader skimming through; you don’t need to keep repeating the same phrase endlessly. That’s why we have synonyms after all.
Meta of course plays a vital part in luring in visitors and shouldn’t become a dumping ground for uber optimisation. Your Meta title and description appears on the search engine results pages, therefore they need to sell the page, not just get SEO brownie points.
You can also have too much content on a page. Some might disagree, but unless you have your page clearly segmented into different sections – for example you might have the main description, followed by customer reviews, then a specification – it just won’t work. A massive bulk of text might water down the relevance of your keywords and confuse visitors.
So essentially, if you keep your SEO work sensible and ethical you can do as much as you want. Pages are very rarely perfect, so taking the time to identify areas for improvement can really help to pay dividends.
