Big-Ticket E-Commerce Marketing StrategyBlueport.com

“At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, [J.C.] Penney was No. 1 in searches for ‘living room furniture.’ By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68. In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country. The next it was essentially buried.”

This excerpt from the New York Times’ "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search" by David Segal sums up the rise and fall of J.C. Penney in organic search results after apparently implementing some black hat approaches to improve its PageRank. Specifically, it appears that J.C. Penney and/or its search firm, which has since been fired, paid to have links in a variety of categories spammed across the web, all pointing back to the company’s home page. This gave J.C. Penney the top rank for a number of searches during the ever-important holiday shopping season. Google didn’t catch the terms violation until the NY Times submitted the evidence. Google immediately took action, causing Penney to lose its rank, but conspiracy theorists wonder if Google might have looked the other way when it came to discretions carried out by one of its largest paid search clients.

If you are working with a third party on your website’s search engine optimization, know that most of them are on the up and up and are not employing black hat tricks to deliver results. But you should be aware of what they are doing, and paying for links can get you on Google’s bad list.

So what can a site looking to get better organic search rankings do?

3 Ways to Improve Your Ecommerce Site's Organic Search PageRank

1. Content is king when it comes to search engines and the web. Create original content that consumers will want to find.

2. Do your keyword research due diligence. Incorporate the words that consumers are using into the content you create. Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool can help, and you can also look at your site’s internal keyword search for ideas. Work these phrases into the content you create, and use them in URLs and hyperlinks to related content.

3. Get other websites to link to your site, not by paying them of course, but by building real, meaningful relationships. Comment on blogs and articles that are related to your site’s expertise, and link out to others. This takes some time, but the eventual benefits will be worth it.