It is the goal of any Internet search engine to provide the most relevant, informative and useful search results for users based on just a few (often times only one) words from a query. If that’s not challenging enough, they have to constantly fight with “black hat” SEOs that try to manipulate the rankings of their own or other companies by exploiting functional algorithmic loopholes in order to turn a profit. As a result of the above two factors along with mutual competition with other search providers, the algorithms for major search engines today such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN have become complex to the point where they are becoming organic, making e-commerce optimization a greater challenge.

Take Google, the world’s leading Internet search engine, as an example. It is estimated that their search algorithm ranks websites based on more than 280 factors. Among the most important, according to seomoz.com’s top ten positive factors, are keyword use in title tags, anchor text of inbound links, global link popularity, age of the site, link popularity within the site’s link structure, etc. In addition, there are also factors that negatively influences a website’s ranking, and if a site is caught for unethical SEO practices, such as using link farms, buying links and link spamming, it automatically becomes flagged for review and may drop off from the ranking charts. In fact, Google has already made necessary algorithm updates where these sorts of black hat SEO tactics are no longer effective.

As search engine companies continue to refine their algorithms, it has become more and more difficult for SEOs (white hat or black hat) to improve or manipulate a website’s rankings because so many factors are involved. And as time moves forward, it will become increasingly the case that the only thing that will guarantee high rankings is having a useful and informative website that is worthy of those rankings.

However, this isn’t to say that the time will come where e-commerce optimization will become obsolete or that this day is just over the horizon. Unlike humans beings who can make quick subjective assessments about the quality and relevance of a given website, search engine robots need to follow a specific set of directions and standards for harvesting websites and the search engine algorithms also have their standards and directions as to what constitutes “useful” and “informative” for a given query. So it remains entirely possible to create a good and relevant website according to human standards while at the same time being non-search engine friendly. The web has more or less established standards, and as long as those standards differ from commonsense, e-commerce marketing will always be useful.

Note: We are pleased to announce a new author to eCommerce Optimization, Jack. He will be posting every Friday about beginner eCommerce and eBusiness strategies, methods and insights as he learns how to properly design, optimize, market and improve eCommerce enabled sites.

Jack is just beginning in the world of eCommerce and offered to share the knowledge he grasps, as he learns it, with our readers. His weekly articles should help new merchants and marketers better understand the steps it takes to become a successful eCommerce SEO and Online marketing guru. Check out the new author profile for more information about Jack.