You've got a great website; the design is simply awesome and your content rocks. However, you still feel that what is good can be made even better. So you tweak your website and then tweak some more until it gets penalized.

It is perfectly natural to want to have the best possible website for your business. Today, no company can be competitive without having a website. But that competitive mindset can undermine all the efforts you have made as well as the resources you have invested.

An Arizona SEO company warns business owners and their webmasters to be a little cautious with the improvements they make on their websites as these can lead to over-optimization.

What exactly is over-optimization?

Over-optimization occurs when a webmaster lavishes too much attention on the technical aspect of search engine optimization or SEO. A website is said to be over-optimized when different SEO improvements are done simultaneously, which creates red flags for search engines. To search engines, your efforts to improve your website seem unnatural. Ideally, after you have laid down a sound structure for your website, your main focus should be on producing relevant and useful content for site visitors.

What are the consequences of over-optimization?

If your website is considered over-optimized, you will be penalized by Google. This means that your website will be removed from the search engine's index and its bots will stop crawling your website. When this happens, your website will be rendered invisible and won't turn up on search results.

Why is Google against the over-optimization of websites?

In the past, Google has said that there will be no penalty for over-optimization. However, this stance has changed with the release of different algorithm updates. Essentially, the goal of penalizing over-optimized websites is to level the playing field. Here, Google seems to favor websites that produce great content over those websites that simply put too much attention on SEO.

What qualifies as over-optimization?

Google uses roughly 200 signals that it uses to evaluate whether a website is over-optimized or not. Typically, over-optimized websites are flagged for multiple red flags. These include:

• Keyword stuffing
• Paid inbound links
• Internal linking with keywords
• Poor web design
• Low-value content
• Using keywords for the domain name
• Publishing duplicate content
• Automatic page redirects
• Using doorway pages
• Excessive use of H1 tags

What do you do when your website is found to be over-optimized and penalized?

The first thing that you need to do is to determine what you have done wrong and make the necessary corrections. After that, you should contact Google about reconsidering your website and including it once more in its index.