It's all about balance, but where is the 'biting point'? The question of 'How Much SEO Is Too Much?' haunts many SEO companies, In-House SEO Consultants and so on. Yes, you need to be competitive, yes, you need to be top the rankings, but can you overly optimise your website to the point that it gets penalised by Search engines? Or worse, removed from an index entirely?

i3SearchWorx have pondered this question for years and to be honest, there really is no clear answer. Search Engine Optimisation is all about competitor analysis, benchmarking and ensuring you are not 'over-egging' the amount of both on-page and off-page activity.

Keywords

Search Engines need to see keywords on a page, afterall, they are machines. They read static text. So it makes sense that they keywords that you are targeting should appear on the corresponding landing pages - But how many repeats of a keyword is too much? Even though i3SearchWorx doesn't strictly believe in a keyword density ratio per say, we do like to think that there is a limit to how many times you should repeat a keyword before it gets seen as being 'spammy'. Our suggestion at this point would be to look at competitors - how many does their page have? Afterall, if they are ranking number 1 for a desired keyword, there is usually a reason why.

Link Building

There is a real grey shade over this area, purely because, you have no control over who links with you...ok, so noone might link to you, but on the otherhand, hundreds, if not, thousands could potentially link with you. Our suggestion here is simple, create viral content to attract links, do not buy/rent links - it's simple to trace viral attraction, but even easier to detect when someone is buying or renting links given the unatural nature of the link profile you create.

On the whole, the answer to our question, how much SEO is too much SEO? - the truth is, noone knows, but be sensible and ensure that you do a lot of competitive analysis and research - it will pay dividends if done correctly.

The rule of thumb is, if you think it's wrong, it probably is - research it before doing it.

Posted: 10/01/11 09:10