subject: SEO for eCommerce Businesses Explained [print this page] SEO for eCommerce Businesses Explained SEO for eCommerce Businesses Explained
There are a lot of misconceptions around search engine optimization that float around in the business world. These range anywhere from
"SEO is unethical and spammy, borderline illegal" and
"it's gaming the search engines"
to
"SEO will help get my site ranked #1, if I only pay this overseas company $99" and
"1000 search engine submissions for $10, what a deal!"
and my favorite
"SEO is dead!"
Surely everyone doesn't have the wrong impression about what SEO is all about.
The honest truth is that each of those statements hold a tiny bit of truth, but none of them really describe SEO accurately. If you are an online retailer, SEO should be important to you. If it isn't, you're falling behind. It is important to all of your competitors. On the Internet, search engines provide the lifeblood. They are the highways customers travel to arrive at your business. If you fail to rank in them, fail to optimize for them, then your business will inevitably fail. eCommerce SEO is absolutely vital to your online business success.
Search engine optimization used to be about the search engines, hence the name. However, when people first began to toss that term around the search engines were pretty dumb. They thought that people could be trusted, so they used simpleton factors like title tags, meta keyword tags, and keyword density to rank things. As we all know, if you make something easy to exploit, it will be exploited. Over. And. Over. Again. SEO got a bad rap early, and it's been trying to shake it ever since.
Lucky for us, search engines have gotten smarter. They can look at the text on a page and tell when it's spammy or abusive. Their algorithms can figure out what your website is really about. When you launch your website selling Captain Kirk shaped chocolate bars, they can tell the difference between a chocolate bar and an open bar at your cousin's wedding.
Search engine optimization, as much as the name might imply, is no longer about optimizing for the search engines. Okay, it is but it isn't. Search engines are a lot closer to "thinking" like a human does these days. Their guidelines are intended to help your website be of the most value to human readers. Thus most of their ranking factors revolve around how useful it is.
Don't think spamming hundreds of variations of Captain Kirk chocolate bar into a single page will help your rankings. It will most likely hurt them. Keep it real. Write your content and optimize it as if you were serving it to human readers. Which you are.
