Black Hat SEO Can Hurt an E-Commerce Website

Jun 9
21:01

2012

Karen Barney

Karen Barney

  • Share this article on Facebook
  • Share this article on Twitter
  • Share this article on Linkedin

Getting search engine traffic is important for many e-commerce sites. However, using certain black hat techniques to make a site search engine friendly can make human visitors run away fast.

mediaimage

There are many ways to get traffic to an e-commerce website.One of the most popular ones is search engine optimization,Black Hat SEO Can Hurt an E-Commerce Website Articles where online shopping site owners try to get traffic from natural search engine results.Search engine optimization companies get a lot of clients running e-commerce websites who want to rank better in search engine results.This, of course, is a good goal to have for any website.However, search engine optimization techniques that are used need to be carefully examined to make sure they wont have a detrimental effect on site visitors.There are two kinds of SEO related changes that could be made to a website.A recent Market Watch report gave some information about these changes and how they can impact a user.Invisible changes are those that most users wont see or pay any attention to.This could include optimizing the speed of the website so that it loads faster, changing meta descriptions or the website title.Visible changes are those that will be seen and often noticed by users like changing the content of pages or navigation elements such as menus.Companies that do Internet marketing will tell you that user experience matters a lot.Remember that the Google Bot which scours your website will not purchase anything.So there needs to be a balance between user friendliness and SEO friendliness on your website.Examples of bad practices include putting keywords in menus or the names of products which will seem strange or out of place to users.Since the Google Panda update, such practices can actually be detrimental to SEO as well.If a user finds that a website is difficult to navigate, or looks highly unprofessional with content that is stuffed with keywords in places where they dont belong, theyre quite likely to go straight for the back button and go explore other search engine results.The Market Watch report published on January 24th gave examples of several e-commerce websites whose rankings went down the drain as a result of user unfriendly on page SEO tactics, even though these websites were consistently ranking high before.Website owners who are looking for better SEO methods can hire experts from a Digital Marketing Agency  that will help them with their SEO work.This includes having a human go through the website pages to see if there are things which can be improved to make it better for visitorsScience Articles, as well as using automated tools which analyze the SEO worthiness of the website and recommend the appropriate changes to implement in order to achieve better SEO results for the site owner.E-commerce site owners need to remember that it is possible to have a website that will be both attractive to end users and also have the recommended SEO elements to help it perform well in search engine results.