We talk periodically about the concept of over-SEOing websites, but for the most part, people don’t really see the downside of it, so long as the over-optimizing doesn’t cross the line into black hat SEO techniques.  But in yesterday’s Google hangout with Bruce Clay, Gary Illyes talks about over-SEOing, and specifically the type of over-SEOing that is problematic in the eyes of Google.

Illyes was talking about the concept of quality, and specifically, quality content.  And this is the area where he sees a lot of over-SEOing happening.

I think with quality, SEOs tend to overthink it.  What I see, I work a lot with websites; it’s part of my job and what I see is that in many cases SEOs “over-SEO”, if that’s a term, a website. What this means is that they are trying to rank for keywords or for terms that the site doesn’t have great value content for.

He again stresses the importance of quality content for all the search queries a site wants to rank for.

And what I see often is people try to rank for queries they don’t have high quality and great value content for, and that’s the problem. Sooner or later the algorithms will catch that, you don’t have to overthink it, it’s simple content analysis and they will adjust the rank for the site, and that’s it.

So essentially if you want to rank for a lot of keywords and want to rank for them long term, you need to have matching quality content to go along with those terms.  You need to give searchers quality and not fluff.