If you think you’re guilty of over-optimization, the first question you will need to ask yourself is whether or not you can read your website content naturally. If it doesn’t sound right and your keywords doesn’t seem to flawlessly integrate with your sentences, then you probably are.
It’s true, Google tries to serve the most relevant pages on its search results but it doesn’t mean that it serves the most keyword dense content as possible. Google looks at so many different things when ranking website pages but the bottom line is “user experience”.
Just like you, people in Google are damn serious about their business and being the largest search engine on earth, they want to build long term relationships with their search users and they can only do this by serving the highest quality content to their audience as much as possible. Of course, from time to time their algorithm fails and you see a bunch of spammy, heavily keyword-stuffed websites on top of the rankings but Google catches up fast, specially for keywords with high search volumes and will promptly degrade their rank.
I believe that there’s really no need in over-optimizing your content pages, instead focus on providing value to your audience by giving them a pleasant user-experience every time they visit your site and continue on with writing more and more great content articles for them.
Concentrating on delivering value to your audience and improving user experience will help you in your rankings than trying to over-optimize your website for your target keyword.
Another thing to take note of is the fact that Google love frequently updated sites and the more content pages you have, the more chances you have to rank for a lot of different keywords, giving you a snowball effect as you build your website.
If you’re wondering why your pages aren’t ranking on the searches and you’re focus too much on keyword optimization, maybe it’s best to just forget about optimization, the important thing is you use your keywords in your title, headlines, and article body but refrain from using it too often – when you use it a couple of times, the search engine already knows what your site is about so focus on delivering your message instead to the human reader who is the most important part of the equation.
One final note. Concentrate on pleasing your human audience and you’ll please the search engine robots!
