Have you ever written a fresh, high quality article in hopes of it ranking high up in search engines, only to find out later that another post from your other domains or social media accounts rank higher than the original post?
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This phenomenon, also known as #keyword cannibalism, is a by-product of an #seo campaign gone wrong. It occurs when you overdo SEO-ing your articles and blast your social media accounts with backlinks to your site, thus your key terms “cannibalize” your preferred articles and your other entries like those in your Digg, Stumble Upon profiles and other web portals end up ranking higher than those in your primary website. Naturally, the best way to avoid this ill effect is to observe proper SEO techniques and to stop overdoing things. Ever heard of the saying too much of anything is bad? That goes for SEO too.
● Create variations in your titles
This phenomenon, also known as #keyword cannibalism, is a by-product of an #seo campaign gone wrong. It occurs when you overdo SEO-ing your articles and blast your social media accounts with backlinks to your site, thus your key terms “cannibalize” your preferred articles and your other entries like those in your Digg, Stumble Upon profiles and other web portals end up ranking higher than those in your primary website. Naturally, the best way to avoid this ill effect is to observe proper SEO techniques and to stop overdoing things. Ever heard of the saying too much of anything is bad? That goes for SEO too.
● Create variations in your titles
Always ensure that each post is unique, and that you employ varying long tail key phrases for ranking instead of just a highly coveted single short tail one. If you have to submit your content to social media portals like Digg, create a new title for each copy you submit so that you don't lose a well-crafted entry on your site to highly trafficked ones that have higher PageRank.
● Spice up key terminologies
Make use of synonyms when drafting content to ensure optimum benefits per post, and so that spiders don't get your posts mixed up due to redundant permalink structure. While it's wise to stick to your particular niche, it is not any wiser to repeat the same keywords time and again in ALL your articles just so you'd have desired keywords ranking high up the hierarchy. Spice up your blog with an assortment of keywords, both short-tail and long-tail. Not only will this prevent keyword cannibalism, it will also keep readers engaged and interested.
● Don't overdo optimization
It's easy to fall prey to overdoing SEO efforts to achieve more than what you'd normally expect for a post, but try not to do so. Overly optimizing anchor text links is a surefire way for unintended posts to cannibalize your intended article.
● Place a no-follow attribute on your site
This may seem counter intuitive to SEO, as a no-follow attribute means you don't want your material indexed by crawlers. And why would you post something that you wouldn't want to be indexed? Well, for the reason that you do not want to dilute search pages or for some posts that are stuffed with keywords to over power one that you wish to rank high.
With more and more blogs cropping up out of nowhere each day, we as SEO marketers wish we could all bag first prize in the keyword competition. Remember though that sometimes less means more. Don't go over optimizing content; you might find that sometimes doing so will reap more benefits for you.
