Comments on: Zappos Secret SEO Sauce For Branded Pages

By: Nate Falconer

Nate Falconer — Sat, 23 May 2009 16:10:35 +0000

The reviews of each shoe is what the customers are actually looking for. Yes, the use of “Nine West” is pretty excessive and looks ‘ugly’ to people who have SEO-eyes but to a regular pageviewer, the attention is on the review and the viewer doesn’t even notice “Nine West” written everywhere. That’s pretty shady SEO

By: Genewize Reviews Guy

Genewize Reviews Guy — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:24:41 +0000

they have actually had the “notify me” feature for a while. They didnt seem to be up to speed on some other things, but as you can clearly see, they are on the wagon now.

By: Genewize

Genewize — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:53:21 +0000

Zappos’ new design does look well conceived. It looks like they’re giving more emphasis to email marketing too, with a “notify me” feature. Or did they have that before and I didn’t notice?

By: Jaan Kanellis

Jaan Kanellis — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:19:30 +0000

Sure the usability of the page stinks because their are so many reviews, but the bottom line is they work. They work for search engines in helping you rank. They help in getting more customers to convert. Take a look at what Amazon does with reviews. Very helpful for search engines and users alike.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:46:29 +0000

Not off topic, totally on topic

By: Dan Shields

Dan Shields — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:24:16 +0000

I always wondered if they were every going to improve their site from a coding, usability, and design perspective. The current site is ugly, cluttered and pretty crappy HTML.

I have to say I am pretty impressed with the new design and code. As a front end developer I am pretty impressed. Everything is nice and semantic and clean.

Sorry to be off topic.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:37:23 +0000

Yeah, Google’s link command will only show you a sampling of what links it knows about and counts. Yahoo’s more comprehensive.

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:28:23 +0000

Worth mentioning are the indexed pages with internal links pointing to the Nine West brand page, with “Nine West” as the anchor text. Yahoo returns Zappos as #3 for “nine west” and report 182 internal links indexed. Google is not showing much if anything in that regard.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:54:52 +0000

@Sam – I agree the content is definitely beneficial – no doubt about it. Scrolling won’t bother everyone either, design is so subjective you can’t please everyone all the time. There is also not important content below the reviews, so it’s not obstructing any functionality of the site. If you don’t want to scroll, hey that’s fine.

It does appear though that the redesign http://zeta.zappos.com (design preview) removes the long string of reviews. A result of user testing? Is the design project incomplete? Will SEO benefits go down without them?

@ DJ

Your upcoming report sounds interesting! There is much that can be said about Zappos’ tactics, if you’re interested Marketing Sherpa has some articles on their strategies (Membership Required)
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.html?ident=30070

By: DJ Waldow

DJ Waldow — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:43:50 +0000

I’m no SEO expert by any means, but if it works, go for it, right? I love Zappos for many reasons. They do SO much right. However, from an email marketing perspective, they don’t seem be up to snuff.

Kimberly Snyder and I are gearing up for another (bigger, better, cooler) live version of BrontoFire – http://blog.bronto.com/category/brontofire/ on email subscription landing pages. Be on the lookout sometime in early May.

However, to whet your appetite…suffice to say, it was *very* difficult to even find the email subscribe link/button on their site…and 5 days since I first registered, I still don’t have the ever-so-critical “Welcome Message.”

Stay tuned for more details on BrontoFire.

dj at bronto

(Linda – how about an entire “series” of posts on Zappos? Kinda evaluate their entire online/offline marketing)? Just a thought.