zappos seo seo moz - adam audette
TRANSCRIPT
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
