Are you a victim of over-SEO?

You can never be too rich or too thin said the Dutchess of Windsor. But, as a website design & development company, we do know that you can be over SEOd. Just ask Google.

It was only a couple of years ago that Google started looking for “over SEOd” sites. That is, sites with keyword densities that were too high, anchor texts that were too similar and duplicated or near duplicated content from other sites.

Google called the algorithms that would help them find all of the above; Google Panda and Google Penguin. They used them both to punish websites who didn’t comply with their requirements for search.

Panda was launched in 2012 and Penguin was launched in April of that year. But, In terms of search, that was eons ago. You would think that, by now, most people—especially SEO “experts” would have caught on. Yet, we still do SEO reports for new clients and routinely find manual actions from Google telling clients that they are being penalized for over SEOd infractions. What’s most amazing is that the clients don’t even know it’s happening . This, despite the fact that they already have a website design & development company or an SEO expert on staff.

As a website design & development company with special SEO expertise, we routinely still get sales inquiries that go something like this: “I need help with my site. We have an SEO person but she is not getting the results we were getting before. Our highest search position is now 50. She says she’s doing all the right things.”

Now, it might be understandable that a business owner isn’t up to speed on SEO. But website design & development company or an SEO expert? That leaves two scenario’s. The so-called expert knows less than the owner. Or, the SEO expert is hiding the Google webmaster manual action notification from his client. The same goes for the website design & development company.

More than likely, the SEO person is, in fact, doing the right things…for 2010. But SEO is much, much harder now. You have to do a lot more things, a lot more often. You also have to know what the latest SEO tactics are, how to quantify results and how to avoid making what can be fatal mistakes that can send your site in the nether regions of search or even worse, get you de-listed all together.