Excellent points - the temptation to overdo & seek out too much info is high! I made it to first page ranking with google & msn in a couple of months following concersative, but correct guidlines.

Cheers!

Deborah, The key is and always has been Keywords and Good Content. Google will reward you if your site is good for the users. By following, as you say conservative guidlines, the rules things will also start to happen. Like users coming back to your site again and again. And when this happens your phone will ring. One of the little tid bits of advice I did was take down all of my guestbooks and allow users free and easy access to anything on my site. It was explained to me like when the explorers came to the new world they burned there ships so they could not go back, Just forward. Well it was scary at first, no more useless emails that where just a crutch, but my phone now periodically rings from people visiting my site. And You know they want my help selling there home. So my site has incubated them. Thanks for the post.

Hope this is not just me rambling.....

Doug,

Thank you for this wonderfully educational post.  Now all I have to do is corner you long enough to take me by the hand and say, " Roberta here is your computer."  All kidding aside this is a great post. Thanks for the learning experience.

Roberta  Where is your phone number at or your contact me button on your website?  I couldn't find it to save my soul! 

Doug  I'm going to watch that video because I didn't think there was such a thing as over optimization! Thanks for the info!

Doug great stuff. I have a very basic site as far as SEO goes but still managed to get it to page 2 of Google for a major search term in under 2 months. I have never required an email to access my site and I have been told by the "experts" I need it. I can tell from the traffic that the same people are coming back to search the MLS some as much as daily. Listing to music but will check out that video later.

Oh my.  I've been working so hard on SEO, I didn't know you could over-optimize.

Ashley, If you site becomes there resource if they are meant to be they will call you. I just sold one this year and two are listed. Both came from phone calls that stated on my web site. By the way Blogging helped my search rankins and google visibility as well too.

Marlene, If you listen to the supposed experts and get reciprical links ( many of them ) and if you know anything about html code ( was earlier microsofts help file language ) then you could optimize some additional headers. Load your site with way to many keywords etc. etc. Instead what Google really wants is for you to have good quality content. No Spam just what would naturally bring users back to view your site again and again. I am sure you will do fine.

I know with my limited knowledge on the subject that I would be hard pressed to over optimize, good article.

I have subscribed to this blog.  I currently am paying for SEO work on my website and I think they are doing a decent job because I have been steadily moving up in the rankings on google.  I have a six month agreement with them so I am hoping that by then I will finally see some business from my site but I do want to learn to do more myself.

Thanks for the info.

I just joined this group today. I have a lot to read.  I am sure I will learn a lot.

Scott, Darrel & Gita, The purpose behind SEO an hour a day is to create two way conversations. I have paid for leads, done Pay Per Click et all. Why should any of us fall for the carrot those vendors throw atus daily. If you learn anything or want to bounce idea's off the group feel free. First join the group Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day Then join in or post any new article on the subject. Even post about those pesky vendors that call and promise you the world. Be careful what they promise is true. The catch is you probably do not want what they are selling.....

Interesting post.  I agree that you can over do things, but the article doesn't really give any examples except the H1 tags.  

Doug,

Sometimes you wonder what is the right thing to do in SEO and what's not because there is so much information out there about it. And if your ranking suddenly drops, it's difficult to make adjustments because you don't know why it happened. Good information.

Thanks for the great information. So much to learn and so little time! Oops, I think we just added some H1 on the site. 

Jim, Thanks for dropping by H1 is in the html code of your site....

Esko, Just take it one day at a time and remember Keyords and Keyword content will win over all the time. Refrain from tricks...

Brian, That was H1 brevity right ?

Thanks for the post, we will check out the whole series. We're working on optimizing our site www.YourMT.com.

This was very educational and will serve as a good reminder to my SEO in the future.

Keep up the great work

Doug, I am not discounting that there is such a thing as over-optimization and a -950 penalty. There could well be. I have not seen it come into play on a site. For that reason, I would want to see specific, real world examples.

I see lot of sites and pages ranking very high with matching title and headline tags....I'd have to say that if there is an overoptimization penalty, then, again, like so many things in SEO, it takes an egregious effort to pass that threshold.

I try to avoid the use of raw SEO theory to guide my work, and I instead look very carefully at what works, consistently. I have seen far too much SEO theory fail to manifest itself in real world results. SEO theory can often sound good "on paper", but fails to hold up to scrutiny.   

One of the real potential pitfalls with this example is to have a site owner who is doing well, climbing the rankings or at the top of the rankings then make changes to their page structure, based on SEO over-optimization theory, and that change then inhibits that good outcome.

That Cutts video is now almost two years old, I think. We need to examine it in that context. Also, he is (as usual) very vague about what "over-optimization" really is.

I am not advising that titles/H1/meta descritions match exactly. They should not. I think that is overkill. But very close correlation still seems to be a real advantage.

That's just what I see, from looking at a hundreds of recent  situations.  

great information thank you for making this post...

-Bryan Flynn