The Risks of SEO

By Adam  |  6 Jun 2016 12:00:00

Everybody with a website, and especially those with an eCommerce website should be doing all they can to optimise their site for search engines. But is it always a good thing? Well, yes, when you do your SEO properly it can be a good way for you to increase your search rankings and also to improve the user experience on your site, but when done badly, the ultimate effect can be very different.

Google is the search engine that most people are concerned about (because it's the search engine which most people use) but in their guidelines they expressly forbid people from doing things in order to try and manipulate the search rankings. This means that if you do things which are very obviously done in the name of boosting rankings, you might be penalised by Google and your site would stop ranking. The things to avoid include paying for links to your site, getting links on spammy sites, keyword stuffing and other similar sorts of things. Penalties can be removed by apologising and using their disavow tool to remove the effect of certain links, but still, that could cause you quite a large waste of time and money.

Don't get me wrong, SEO is a good thing which you should definitely be doing, but before you implement any strategy, always be sure to do a bit of research first. Check to see if there are many people endorsing the method and if there are, how long ago did they endorse it? The search algorithms are always changing and what may have been beneficial a few years ago might be detrimental today. Just keep this in mind and, hopefully, you'll be able to increase the rankings for your eCommerce website. But if you don't even have an eCommerce website yet, then sign up to Sellr now and get started for no cost at all.