Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reviewing optimization work performed by my team as well as many of our client’s competitors. I’ve been studying the quality of the optimization work performed, both as a measure of comparison, and to simply get a feel for what other people are doing that perhaps we are not. What I found was pretty eye opening.
In many cases, as I peruse through the text and code, I can hardly tell where any “optimization” has occurred. It’s like knowing that surgery was performed but not being able to see the scar. Yet in some instances the on-page optimization looked like surgery performed by Leatherface of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This is what I call “SEO Bloat”.
SEO bloat happens when one or more of the following things occur:
- using keyword density as a measure
- continuously adding keywords into page, attempting to push rankings up
- having too many hands in the pot (copywriter, seo, manager, etc.), all tweaking text for their purposes
- no one keeping an eye on the “big picture” that keeps all of these things in control