Tips to Avoid Over Optimized Pages in WordPress

Many of you are aware that Google a while back instituted what they termed an over-optimization penalty, which essentially went after webmasters who had been trying to lift their pages in the search results by virtue of manipulating the keyword density of the page, whether or not it had any value for the reader.

This played out with folks being told to build their pages having a keyword density of between 2.5 and 5 percent for their primary keyword. The problem was, at least for many of us using WordPress and similar blogging platforms as our content management system, we now know that:

WordPress isn’t quite as “SEO ready” as we first thought!

It turns out that WordPress just loves to stuff your blog template with your primary keyword. Just by using some of the default and popular widgets you can have dozens of mentions of your keyword before you’ve even written it one time! If you count up the times it appears in elements like titles, tags, categories, author links, archives and more, you’ll be amazed at how many times you’re using them. Google looks at the entire page of code, not just the article or blog post when determining how to rank your content!

So what can you do to avoid this?

Here are some tips to avoid instant over-optimization in WordPress.

• Stop using tags – The use of tags and tag clouds grossly inflates the number of times your keyword is used on the page. Entirely not needed!
• Take out the author link from your template – This produces another exact duplicate version of your post, which is duplicate content defined! Google how to do this.
• Don’t use breadcrumb navigation – More keywords that aren’t serving a useful purpose.
• Don’t have duplicate navigation menus – You see it all of the time: a top navigation bar, with an identical version in the sidebar.
• Do away with the recent posts widget – A staple in many WordPress installs that will only lead to poor rankings!

For more great tips on how to avoid over-optimizing your WordPress content go see this awesome post!