On page optimization is a tricky thing to do if you’re just winging it in hopes to get top rankings for your website in Google and the other search engines. You can easily mess something up and know you did until you see your website slowly dropping within Google, Yahoo! and Bing. When doing your on-page optimization for the search engines, you’re basically letting them know what every single page on your website is all about.

If the search engines can evaluate your website efficiently, and figure out exactly what you’re all about, you have a better chance of getting ranked for your ideal keywords. If you get ranked for specific keywords related to your website and niche, you will increase the likelihood of making a sale. The more searched a keyword is, the more chances you have of getting a sale, and this is why many website owners will target high trafficked keywords.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, and you target some of these competitive keywords, you could actually hurt your website more than you could help it. For this reason, a lot of businesses will outsource the SEO work to a credible company so they can ensure a penalty is not in their future. Of course, an SEO company could still get you a penalty, and this is why you need to do your research prior to hiring one. If you can’t afford to hire your own SEO company to do the work for you, simply follow these “What not to do” points and you will be able to avoid a penalty.

Don’t stuff keywords into your content

When you add a bunch of keywords into your content, not only will it be difficult to read, the search engines will it as you’re trying to artificially rank your website for that keyword. If you’re caught keyword stuffing, you will definitely obtain a penalty and you won’t know unless you’ve been tracking your rankings for some time.

To avoid this kind of penalty, try to keep your website under a 3% keyword density. This means that you can have 3 of your target keyword within 100 words of content. Some people like to go up to 5% keyword density, but that’s risky because the search engines could change how they look at websites and penalize anyone with 5% or higher keyword density. We don’t know what the search engines are going to change, and this means it could affect us in a good or even a bad way when they do. Get used to writing your content at a 3% keyword density and you will be glad you did if the search engines change their algorithms to prioritize lower keyword density websites.

Don’t hide keywords in the background

Unlike keyword stuffing where you can do it by accident, hiding your keywords into the background by changing the color of the text so it blends in, you will be blatantly breaking the rules when it comes to increasing the rankings of your website. If you are caught doing this, you will immediately get penalized and it’s pretty tough to bounce back.

Hidden keywords are something you go out of your way to do, so the search engines don’t take kindly to this. You will usually get a penalty within the day of them noticing this, and you will have to go back to change everything that was blended, then wait for the search engine spiders to come back and hopefully index your pages properly.

Don’t duplicate your content

Duplicating your content is another thing that can hurt your website. Basically, you will be adding the same article multiple times to your website, but changing some titles and descriptions in order to target different keywords. Another way of adding duplicate content is to add content you copied from a different website and adding it to your own. There are actually a lot of websites that claim you can copy and paste content from other websites, and be perfectly fine, but I always recommend that people should rewrite the content or just write their own content so they don’t have to worry about any sort of penalty.

Don’t use spun content

Spun content is when you take a bunch of similar articles and basically mash them together to make a new article. Sure, it will be “unique” but it won’t be very readable to the people coming to your website. If your content is readable, you will notice that your website isn’t ranking as high as you’d like it to be.

There are no shortcuts when it comes to increasing the rankings of your website within the search engines, so treat your website like a business and do everything as well as you can.

To avoid a content penalty, be sure to write up your own unique content. There are no shortcuts when it comes to increasing the rankings of your website within the search engines, so treat your website like a business and do everything as well as you can.

In Conclusion

On page optimization is an easy thing to do, but it’s also easy to screw up and gain a penalty from the search engines. Avoid stuffing your keywords, blending your text into the background, adding duplicate content to your website, and avoid using spun content in order to keep everything completely white hat and the search engines love your website. You can do this yourself and hire an SEO company to do the difficult part of improving your off page optimization in order to take over your niche.

Read more about On Page Optimization and Why You Need it for Your Website and The Power of Off Page Optimization Combined with On Page Optimization.