1. Adam Audette July 29, 2011 MozCon Seattle How To Rank Item-level URLs

4. SEO is simple.

5. Different CMS platforms, software Different stakeholders Different business decisions Too many possibilities, where to start? Different situations SEO is simple.

8. SEO becomes complex.

9. SEO is a long, hard road

10. Meanwhile, we’re doing stuff

11. Compromise is at every step.

12. So many stakeholders.

13. Execution is everything.

14. Here’s another thing:

15. SEO is situational.

17. Best practices only get you so far.

18. You need competitive advantages.

19. Risk

20. Innovation

21. SEO is easy to say, and hard to do.

23. How To Rank Item-Level URLs

24. The Home Page

25. “ Reasonable Surfer” Patent

26. Nav links ≠ contextual links ≠ footer links

27. Limit global navs

31. Create canonical crawl paths

32. Clean, canonical links

33. Exact match anchors: very important internally

34. HTML 5 structure elements

36. Categories

37. Categories are the secret.

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

39. Products don’t link to unrelated categories Categories link via navigations

40. Rank categories for your head terms.

41. Focus external links on categories.

44. Age & velocity of external links.

46. Minimize cross-category links (in content)

47. Mostly: preserve category URLs

51. Everything stores in the URL

54. Items

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

56. Related links are massively powerful.

60. Hardly anyone’s doing it for SEO!

61. It’s quite hard to do.

62. Less is more: 5-10 related products.

63. Quality > quantity

64. Shortest URL possible

65. Not a fan of hierarchy in URLs

66. Shallow click path

68. How we’re doing it at Zappos

69. 1. Focus on categories

70. (with business interest)

71. 2. Link contextually internally to categories

72. (lean on categories to pass equity)

75. 3. Band-aid the faceted navigation

77. 4. Enter: Product Showdown

79. (also: twitter.zappos.com for cats)

81. Successfully bridged categories to product-level URLs

82. 5. Battling for URL preservation

83. (but products constantly change)

84. Testing how to expire products

85. Testing Dead Products

87. Video is a big focus

89. SEO Results from Video

90. SearchMetrics study on video

91. How likely is content to rank?

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

93. SERP Presentation & CTR

94. SERP presentation and SEO

95. Better ranking ≠ more traffic

98. Methods for Employing Usage Stats http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/07/how-google-might-rank-pages-based-upon-usage-information/

100. How To Maximize Product Visibility in Organic Search (SEW) http://plotin.us/oMbt8b

101. Thank you! Adam Audette twitter.com/audette www.audettemedia.com