Lane from Business Resources asks "Is it possible to over-optimise pages on your website?"

A:  The answer to this is a big fat YES. When optimising websites many people forget they're writing a page firstly for humans and secondly for the search engines. Most of the things in this article won't get you kicked out of a search engine and probably won't incur too much of a penalty, but from my experience SEO is also about marketing to people and converting these people into customers, not just about the rankings.

Keyword stuffing
Adding multiple versions of a keyword on either a page or in your title tags can cause penalties. Probably the worst thing about this type of strategy is that it will greatly affect your click-through rate.

lf you think about it who wants to click on a listing that says:
Pet food, dog food, cat food, natural pet food, pet food products

The general rule of thumb here is that if you show this to your Grandma and she can understand the content and doesn't say "Why did you put all those pet foods in there?" then you should be OK.

Unnatural Linking Structures
When linking to your pages it's a wise move to keep a natural linking structure in mind.

What's a natural linking structure?
A natural linking structure is the normal links you would put in a page because you reference something on your website. The links should flow to relevant pages and use anchor text that makes sense.

Adding loads and loads of internal links to your website using keywords as opposed to phrases with keywords in them creates a really bad looking page.

Unnatural backlinks
When people link to a website they usually link to it using a web address or a natural term in their content. Having multiple links going to your website with the same anchor text over and over again will put up a red flag to the engines.