zappos seo seo moz - adam audette

Adam Audette July 29, 2011

MozCon Seattle

How To Rank Item-level URLs

SEO is simple.

Different CMS platforms, softwareDifferent CMS platforms, software

Different stakeholdersDifferent stakeholders

Different business decisionsDifferent business decisions

Too many possibilities, where to start?Too many possibilities, where to start?

Different situationsDifferent situations

SEO is simple.

SEO becomes complex.

9

SEO is a long, hard road

10

Meanwhile, we’re doing stuff

Compromise is at every step.

So many stakeholders.

Execution is everything.

Here’s another thing:

SEO is situational.

Best practices only get you so far.

You need competitive advantages.

19

Risk

20

Innovation

SEO is easy to say, and hard to do.

How To Rank Item-Level URLs

The Home Page

“Reasonable Surfer” Patent

Nav links ≠ contextual links ≠ footer links

Limit global navs

Create canonical crawl paths

Clean, canonical links

Exact match anchors: very important internally

HTML 5 structure elements

Categories

Categories are the secret.

Products link to their category parent and to other closely related categories

Products don’t link to unrelated categories

Categories link via navigations

Rank categories for your head terms.

Focus external links on categories.

Age & velocity of external links.

Minimize cross-category links (in content)

Mostly: preserve category URLs

Everything stores in the URL

Items

Products link to their category parent and to other closely related products

Related links are massively powerful.

Hardly anyone’s doing it for SEO!

It’s quite hard to do.

Less is more: 5-10 related products.

Quality > quantity

Shortest URL possible

Not a fan of hierarchy in URLs

Shallow click path

How we’re doing it at Zappos

1. Focus on categories

(with business interest)

2. Link contextually internally to categories

(lean on categories to pass equity)

3. Band-aid the faceted navigation

4. Enter: Product Showdown

(also: twitter.zappos.com for cats)

Successfully bridged categories to product-level URLs

5. Battling for URL preservation

(but products constantly change)

Testing how to expire products

Testing Dead Products

Video is a big focus

SEO Results from Video

SEO Results from Video

SearchMetrics study on video

How likely is content to rank?

http://searchengineland.com/what-wins-in-google-universal-search-blogs-images-google-87361

SERP Presentation & CTR

SERP presentation and SEO

Better ranking ≠ more traffic

Methods for Employing Usage Stats

http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/07/how-google-might-rank-pages-based-upon-usage-

information/

How To Maximize Product Visibility in Organic Search (SEW)

http://plotin.us/oMbt8b

Thank you!Thank you!

Adam Audette twitter.com/audette

www.audettemedia.com