This weeks tip is rather a DO NOT rather than a DO. Our tip for this week is DON’T OVER OPTIMISE.

Gone are the days where you need to cram your keywords into every part of your page. In fact these days repeating your search terms too many times can trip Google’s SPAM filter and could lead to your site being ignored.

If you have the same keyword in each of these areas on a page its too much:

Title tag
Visible page title styled with an H1 tag
Page subtitles styled with an H2 tag
First sentence / paragraph on the page
Hyperlinks within the page content
In all internal links to the page
Image alt tags

That isn’t to say that these aren’t all valuable places to have relevant words you would like to rank for. Just make sure it isn’t exactly the same ones in each place. It wouldn’t make sense to your visitors to repeat the same words over and over all over a page and it doesn’t make sense to search engines either.

Try to keep your optimisation as natural as possible. If you have chosen your search terms wisely they should easily and naturally fit into different areas on the page.

Think about your users first and the search engines second.