At Last ... A Nice Video About Over-Optimisation

One of my pet hates is over-optimisation. But what is it? That's the holy-grail of SEO - how much you can get away with before it starts to cause a net reduction in traffic from natural results.

If you wanted a really simple discussion to get you thinking about if you've gone too far with your sites then watch the video below.

Much of my SEO time is spent bringing sites "back into the fold" or increasing the focus a bit more on to the user rather than directly on the search engines and the SEOmoz video is a good, basic introduction to that debate.

I don't 100% agree with it, but that's because its a complete introduction to the topic. One part I'd add when looking at focusing on users mentioned in the video was that you should think about whether visitors would like to your site. Now I know this is more likely with the advent of blogging and social tools, but I would also add into to that increasing the propensity that people would refer your site via email and non-crawled sources as it has secondary affects. There's often talk of what I call "flood effects" whereby if a site gets a lot of traffic from non-crawled sources that would have an effect on the site's rankings (controversial I know).

Furthermore, I'd add about thinking of users in the context of decreasing bounce rates. Now this is conjecture and not wholly proven. But I'd do everything in my power to decrease bounce rates from the SERPS because I know that they are measured on occasion. Keeping people in your site for longer, in my mind, can only have beneficial affects. But if you're running an affiliate site your objective may be to get people in and out as quickly as possible - you have to balance up wants and needs on this one.

Another aspect that wasn't covered, and I hope it is in the future, is the appropriate use of display:hidden for controlling navigation elements V. keyword stuffing.

Anyway, enjoy the video:


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - On-Site Over Optimization from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.