How to overdo it with your SEO writing
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Want to see how horrible it is when you overdo your keyword optimization? Tell me how long you can honestly pay attention to this article about what to look for in an SEO consultant. I laughed out loud as I read it.
My favorite sentence:
Many SEO consultants offer more SEO services than just content so if you already have a professional SEO writer you should ask that writer if he or she also does SEO consultations or provides other SEO services.
Your SEO consultant when providing their SEO service should never SEO consultant write just for the SEO search engines, but your SEO consultant should provide SEO consultations on providing SEO services to write for people. SEO services. 
April 1st, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Granted, I’m not an SEO Consultant
, but isn’t it just as effective to understand how my customers would search for me (i.e., what terms they use) through an interview or survey, then have my marketing communications person make sure those terms and phrases are optimized in my web content and other materials, and then work with an SEO consultant, or you, to help me with the tech stuff? Theoretically, my mar comm person knows my business voice already and I don’t want someone else learning my business while rewriting all of my stuff. Just thinking out loud…
April 1st, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Yes, you should very much be interested in what keywords customers are using in search engines. When you do that, you are learning “the language of the customer,” which is a great way to use language that resonates with your customers in their own terms.
The point though is that this can be overdone. If you write for the search engines and not people, you end up writing something like that ridiculous article. Also, search engines are sensitive to “over-optimization” of keywords and will lower your ranking if you overdo it.
The example that I link to in my post illustrates someone who is just clueless. He is actually hurting himself with his “SEO” efforts.
April 1st, 2009 at 3:58 pm
“but isn’t it just as effective to understand how my customers would search for me (i.e., what terms they use) through an interview or survey”
Hi Sharon, that is the point. Many companies use terms on their sites that do not reflect what your clients or potential clients are searching on. There are several great ways to determine that and you mentioned two. There are other tools as well that will help show you terms that people are searching and the search volume. You may be in a very small niche and the volume may be low but that does not mean it is a bad term for you.
The SEO consultant can help to make sure that your site is properly optimized. That is the meta tags are set up correctly and that you use the terms correctly in your content.
Meta tags are used by the search engines to quickly see what your page is about. Then they compare the content to the tags to see if what you said the page was about is true in order to determine how relevant the page is to the keywords in you meta tags. If your keywords are not relevant to the content on the page you will not show up in the search results.
Two big mistakes folks make (their are more than 2!) with meta tags:
1. they use the same meta tags for every page on their site. Very bad.
2. they stuff the keyword meta tag with every keyword they can think of. Very very bad.
Rule of thumb: if the keyword is not in the content don’t put it in the tag.
You can have the most optimized page on the internet but if you do not have one way links to your site you will not carry much weight and will not show up in search results.
Hope this helps.
April 1st, 2009 at 4:03 pm
OK, it was not my best article! I had a ghost writer and it was publish before I got a look at it. I was going for the back links.
April 2nd, 2009 at 7:41 am
Well you got a nofollowed backlink making fun of your article. How did that work out for you?
Also, do you think the article represents you well as a professional?