A few months ago I had switched from the recommended SEO plugin All-In-One to Yoast Seo.

When I first set it up I was super excited because it gives you all kinds of recommendations to fix SEO issues.

One of them is to have a keyword density of .5%. After following this recommendation on one of my posts I jumped instantly from around 12 or 13 to 7!

I was hooked so I went through all of my old posts and applied these recommendations.

However, since I have come to Mexico, I have gained access to some spreadsheets to identify SEO issues.

One of them is over-optimization.

So to test this, I took a post that was ranking at the top of page two for its main keyword.

I removed the keyword so that it is only on the page two times, I even removed it from alt tags as well.

I removed the keywords in the first week of January.

In about a month this page has jumped almost to the middle the first page!

So, long story short, follow the training when they tell you to use the keyword in the title and in the first paragraph, then write naturally after that.

This page also jumped for several other keywords as well during the last month.

Now I just need to find the time to go back through all of my other posts and fix this issue!