Now that we have finished part one and part two of our beginners guide to search engine optimization, it’s time to talk about some of the things people tend to worry about that can cause a lot of headaches and not a lot of results.  Why would we talk about things that don’t matter? Because many website owners fixate on these things, taking their focus away from the things that will give you better results with your marketing campaign.

The first thing you should avoid falling in love with is keyword density. Keyword density is the number of times that a particular keyword or phrase appears on a page compared to other words. While this is something that search engines consider, the optimal density is between 1 and 3 percent! What this means is that as long as you use the keywords naturally, you should be fine. Often times, when people obsess over keyword density their content becomes spumy and unreadable. As long as your content is in line with your title, your keyword density should be just fine.

Another thing people tend to worry about is the quality of the links that are being sent to their site. This doesn’t mean that you should turn a blind eye to who is posting links to your site, but don’t overly concern yourself with it. While it’s true that an overabundance of spam links can have a negative affect on your pages authority, this affect is minimal, and oftentimes if you are not actively trying to get these links, you will not get many. Unfortunately, there is not much you can you can really do save for send an email and request they make it a “nofollow”, but if the link is truly spam, don’t give yourself a headache when they do not respond. Besides, most search engines claim that they can see past these, and therefore alleviate your fear of losing your search engine result page (or SERP) rank.

SERP rank, one of the most popular SEO tips is also something we strongly believe you should concern yourself less with. As noted in the first part of the beginner’s guide, being on the first page of search results is vital, but worrying about having a post being the number one will often result in doing a lot of work with minimal gain. Instead spend more time on optimizing your site for converting sales, and appearing on the front page for a wide variety of relevant search queries. Besides, if you are getting a fair amount of clicks and are already on the first page of results, converting the clicks to sales is far more important than being number one.

The good news about website owners having these obsessions is that if you don’t obsess over them, you get the upper hand. Because you don’t spend all your time focusing on SEO strategies that use too much time and offer little reward,. Instead spend time optimizing your site, or creating better content so when your visitors do arrive, they are more likely to stay, as well as return to your blog or website.