This is a true story happened to a SEO friend of mine. What he did was right in early SEO practice, however time has been changed. Google has changed its rules and some SEO techniques have to be updated. The alt tag of the first image of a website should be your most desired keyword phrase. That's right. Let's say the alt text is ‘online bookstore'. My SEO friend put ‘online bookstore buying' as the alt text in the second picture and ‘bookstore for sale' as the third alt text...etc. That's not right. Every individual term should only appear once in your alt text, anything more than that would only harm you. The sad thing is that you wouldn't even notice it even though it is hurting you because you would not be banned overnight. Your ranking in some of your strong keywords with a lot of anchored links would not even have any changes. Guess what happen after I told my SEO friend to delete the repeated keywords which means if ‘bookstore' is in the first alt tag, the other alt tags should not have ‘bookstore'. 2 days later after Google cached the changed page, one keyword phrase raise from 180 to 75, another main keyword phrase raise from 33 to 10, and another main keyword phrase raise from 8 to 4. The other 3 strong keywords with a lot of anchored links remains the same, number 1. And that's not all. I bet there are so much different in the ranking of other keyword phrases too, but I have only checked 6 of them by hand in Google since Google doesn't like auto detection.

Don't optimize every page

Another SEO strategy is that: don't optimize every page! The main page and the sub-pages sometimes share very similar keywords. Take the bookstore as example. If the keyword phrase ‘online bookstore' appears in your main page, your sub-pages would probably have the same term ‘online bookstore' written. And you usually encourage other websites to link to your main page not your sub-pages. And you must be thinking Google would rank for your main page in the keyword phrase ‘online bookstore' because you have a lot of links to this main page. However, you don't know what Google is thinking. This sub-page which has no inbound links rank in this phrase instead of your main page. This situation doesn't always happen, it is indeed rare. However, still it happens. You might be thinking ‘I don't care, as long as it ranks.' What would really happen is your sub-page would rank very low because of lack of inbound links. So, the current ranking sub-page has to be de-SEO. After undo the SEO of the sub-page, such as bold text keyword phrase…etc, the main page is ranked for the targeted keyword phrase instead of the sub-page. And because the main page has many inbound link, it ranks much higher than the sub-page. As I remember, it jumped about 60 positions. Only optimize the sub-pages if you are getting links for these sub-pages. So once Google choose your sub-page to rank it would rank high.

Another reminder is that ‘don't be afraid the lack of keyword density, only beware of too much keyword density.' I have seen a page only have its keyword phrase mentioned once and ranks number one in a very competitive term. Who? That's Wikipedia. After all, the quality of the content and the quality of links are the most considerable factors.