Over-optimisation 'hinders search engine marketing'

The over-optimisation of web pages could have a detrimental impact on a website's ranking, it has been claimed.

Online marketing strategies should be careful not to include too many keywords, according to Eric Enge in his blog for Search Engine Watch.

He claimed search engine optimisation (SEO) problems to avoid are having identical page titles and H1 headings, too many non-contextual internal links on a site and not balancing the amount of text to other items on a page, such as video or images.

Mr Enge noted the way search engines such as Google and Yahoo! rank sites means relevance will always provide better results than shoehorning keywords and bombarding readers with links.

Meanwhile, black hat SEO operations have increased significantly over the last week, with more than 280 search terms being attacked, according to a study by SonicWall.

The firm claimed up to 6,600 black hat SEO operations were identified during the last seven days, with the research showing that each black hat site can attack up to nine different terms at once.

This news article was provided by Exchange Media: Natural search experts