Welcome to the World Wide West – What color is your hat?
by Michael - June 10th, 2008 12:00 pm
I miss the days depicted in those old westerns.
You know the ones I’m talking about – when the good guys had white hats and the villains were always topped in black. Life may have been tough back then, but at least you always knew where you stand and you could spot your enemies from 200 yards.
Nowadays the same premise applies to the world of ecommerce, especially in the realm of your SEO techniques and practices. Regardless of the ecommerce internet solution you employ on your website there are practices that can get you marked as a black hatter and you may be doing it without knowing.
Here are three things that can get your website blacklisted quicker than almost anything else:
1. Abuse of doorway pages and automatic redirects in your website. The user never sees them so they’re harmless, right? WRONG. Search engine spiders are fully aware of what is happening and in many cases this tactic can get your entire website tagged for review – and not in a good way.
2. Hidden text. At one time I did this myself, but at the time HTML was fairly new and the search engines didn’t know any better yet. Hidden text is the practice of creating text on a page that is not readily visible because it is the same color as the background on which it exists.
3. Keywords on Steriods. Keyword bloat is the number one way to get the search engine doors to your website slammed in your face. You may not even think you have overused a keyword in your posts or articles but if a word or phrase comprises more than two to five percent of the text, you have overdone it.
There are programs available that can ensure your keyword usage is where it should be. I have used a program called DupeFree Pro with great success for quite a while. It also can check two similar articles for plagarism (which is actually what it was designed for primarily).
While there are a lot of things to keep in mind while you are dealing with ecommerce web site development, it really doesn’t have to be complicated, and it can be done in a purely white hat way.
While you may be tempted to don the black hat now and then, in the cut throat world of the new World Wide West you need to be on top of your game to remain the good guy in the eyes of your customers.
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