There's a certain balance between optimizing your content and over optimizing it. One that's important to get right if you want to enjoy success with your SEO. Just because you can do something, doesn't always mean you should. Overdoing things can sometimes lead to penalties. You can generally notice these points because what you're doing often also leads to a bad user experience. Here's a guide to five areas where you should strive for a good balance.

Think about it - why are you creating web pages to start with? For your audience and because you want your audience to learn something or do something. You should focus your SEO practices to your audience too. This is a long way of saying - write your content for your audience. Use relevant keywords and don't use misleading ones just because they're higher traffic. Don't keyword stuff. Just write well researched and engaging content and use keywords naturally in your pages.

You've seen websites with about 10 million links in the footer right? Did you read them all? Were they of any interest to you? The print size is often so tiny that you'll need to get a magnifying glass out just to be able to read them and decide if they're relevant to you, which they're invariably not. Don't stuff your footer (or your head) with links. Keep it for the most important links that you're visitor is most likely to want to visit next.

Anchor text is the text inside a link. It's a key indicator to search engines about what the topic of the linked page is. It's tempting to stuff these with exact-match keywords as the search engines will then rank them right? Wrong. Over time the theme has become more and more important in comparison to the exact text. Sure, use your keywords in your link anchor texts but use them when they fit naturally. The text in the anchor text should help users know a bit about the page they'll be sent to if they click the link.

We all know that links are the magic juice that pumps up your web pages search engine rankings. But do you really need every link you can find? Should you get a bulk link creation service to create you a million links from anywhere? Increasingly the quality and topic of a link is important. Focussing your time on high quality links that are relevant to the topic of your site/page is a far less risky strategy, with more benefit for the time spent.

Every page should have a purpose. It should provide information, add value, and/or solve a problem. Creating pages just to add more pages is an unproductive time waste. Instead find the gaps in your content and fill them in. Write on-topic, helpful, content. Your audience will love it, and the search engines will too.

Please don't think here that we're saying don't do anything SEO. If you log into The Crawl Tool and do an audit then you'll find plenty that needs doing. What we are saying is that often these things go hand in hand with improving your site's user experience. For example, when you fix some broken links. It's a good way to guide your work in order to not waste time or push things to far - ask yourself "does this improve the user experience of my visitors?"