Are Your Pages Being Over-Optimized?
One of the recent updates Google endowed us with over the last few years included what became known as the over-optimization penalty. This one is basically aimed at Webmasters who attempt to stuff their pages with keywords in the hopes of raising them in the search engine results.
This played out with people being told to create their pages having a keyword density of between 2.5 and 5 percent for their primary keyword. The problem was, at least for a lot of of us using WordPress and similar blogging platforms as our content management system, we now know that:
WordPress isn't quite as “SEO ready” as we first thought!
It turns out that WordPress just loves to stuff your blog template with your primary keyword. By simply using many of the default and popular widgets you could have dozens of mentions of your keyword before you've even written it once! If you count up the times it appears in elements like titles, tags, categories, author links, archives and more, you'll be amazed at just how many times you're using them. Google looks at the entire page of code, not merely the article or blog post when deciding where to rank your content!
So what can you do to avoid Over-Optimization?
Here are a few tips to avoid instant over-optimization in WordPress.
- Don't ever use tags again! – Tags and particularly tag clouds inflate your keyword density beyond belief. Get out of the habit!
- Remove the author link from your template – That little link simply produces another duplicate version of your post, inviting trouble.
- Sweep up the breadcrumbs! – Breadcrumb navigation is another useless addition of keywords injected into the mix for no apparent reason.
- Don't duplicate your navigation – Many times we'll have a top nav menu combined with the same thing duplicated on the sidebar. You don't need both, unless you're partial to over-optimization penalties!
- Kill the recent posts widget – Another demonstration of your template contributing to your ranking demise!
