DIY SEO – How to Avoid Being Penalised by Over SEO’ing your website.

Last updated on March 28th, 2024 at 12:40 pm

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a really useful way for companies to get greater exposure online without ludicrous amounts of money on TV or radio adverts. The general idea behind SEO is to research ‘keywords’ for your industry (words that people use to search Google to find your products/services) and then aim for appear in Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for those terms. With some skill and time, your site will begin to rise up the ranks of Google, and if you have done your research correctly and are using highly searched keyterms, then the higher you can get your site to the top of Google, the better the chance there is of someone visiting.

Because search engine optimisation is so important, it’s understandable that a lot of business owners and websites will have SEO in their minds at all times, but sometimes this can go too far. SEO is very powerful and useful, but it’s easy to forget that it is only a tool to help your website become more popular, not the entire point of the website. If you’re using a hammer to put up shelves, it’s the shelves you are focusing on, not how great the hammer is.

This is most apparent when people who haven’t hired a professional SEO agency try to write SEO articles, so here a few tips for those going it alone:

What is the goal of your article?

Before writing an article, decide why you are writing it. Is it relevant to your business? Does it add something to your site? Is it unique? These should be your first questions. After that comes the most important: Will anyone want to read this?

You can’t really expect people to find an article of interest, if all you are doing is listing a bunch of keywords to keep a search engine happy, nor should you expect a reader to find an article engaging if it’s been badly formatted or is full of grammar and spelling mistakes. There’s a lot of great content online, so you need to make sure that at the very least your writing is clear, concise and interesting to read.

Keywords

In the past, many webmaster tried to fool search engines by throwing a bunch of keywords into hidden text (E.g. white text on a white background) at the bottom of a page, but search engines are not that easily fooled these days. When that stopped working, article writers and weaker SEO agencies turned to throwing these keywords around in the article text instead, aiming more for a high ‘keyword density’ than a good, informative article.

This might seem like a great idea, but while the search engines might not see anything wrong with the same three words being mentioned together five times within a short article, readers will. It’s painfully obvious even to people that know very little about SEO that the article is repeating itself and reads poorly. Good SEO writing will use relevant keywords when they sound correct and work within the flow of the piece, so you shouldn’t have to demand a certain amount of keywords just to appease Google. In fact, in this day and age you would most likely trigger a Google filter, or penalty for ‘keyword stuffing’, which in turn could see your search engine rankings suffer a massive dip, possibly permanently! It is much better to just focus on writing a great article, and give it a relevant title, that contains either your keyword, or terms related to it.

Content Really is King

As any good SEO agency can tell you, all the keyword stuffing in the world doesn’t compete with good content. Search engines are still looking out for keywords and Meta tags to some extent, but reputation is something they find much more important. If Google notices that your site is being linked to a lot from other quality websites, it assumes that your content must be worth reading.

Creating genuinely well written, interesting and unique content is a much bigger challenge than just throwing keywords about, but the rewards can be huge if you get something to the front page of a social bookmarking site like Digg, or get mentioned on a popular industry blog.

In summary, write for people first and search engines second. Do not ignore or forget the power of search engine optimisation, but don’t put all your faith into algorithms. After all, it is people that will buy your products and use your services, and not a search engine robot.