Over-optimizing to improve ranking

Over-optimization refers to the excessive use of optimization techniques that ultimately yields either penalization or poor rankings. We've touched on over-optimization throughout this book, and it always remains a danger if one is actively optimizing and promoting a site. A good way to think about over-optimization is "Unnatural optimization". Put another way, the search engines want to present search results that represent naturally-written content. They don't want to display content that specifically manipulates rankings. For example, would it be natural that an article on Houston apartments would have the phrase "Houston apartments" repeated 20 or 30 times in the article? Of course not. This is where the over-optimization component of the search engines' algorithms come into play.

Over-optimizing of on-page factors: Guidelines

You must ensure that your on-page factors (text, headings, bold, ALT tags, and so on) are not over optimized. If you write your...