Should your SEO emulate the same optimization found on top websites?
To answer this question, look at Amazon.com.
Amazon.com is in the business of SEO. It may employ more SEO professionals than any other company; if not, it is right up at the top. Amazon incorporates SEO into everything, both manually and programmatically.
As one of the most trafficked sites — a website with hundreds of millions of indexed URIs — it enjoys the luxury of being able to test more things than most other websites, and at a deeply nuanced level.
If that is true, then copying Amazon.com’s SEO is a no brainer, right?
Not so fast!
Consider the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. According to the model, there are five levels of aptitude.
Novice
Advanced Beginner
Competent
Proficient
Expert
If Amazon.com is an SEO expert, then according to the Dreyfus model, it “transcends reliance on rules, guidelines, and maxims.” Amazon has a deep situational awareness and understanding of:
How search engines behave
Amazon.com’s content
Amazon.com’s authority
How search engines respond to Amazon.com’s on-site optimization
In other words, Amazon.com knows when to break rules like the ones in beginner and advanced SEO guides.
Want proof? Let’s look at Amazon.com’s homepage.
Title Element
Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more
This title is 83 characters long. In the search engine results pages (SERPs), Google cuts it off, and Bing merely displays Amazon.com – Official Site.
While 83 characters is not terribly long, it is clear Amazon.com is not worried about exceeding what the search engines will display. It knows most searchers arriving on their site are doing so via navigational queries.
When people see the homepage, they know what Amazon.com is and they know this is their destination. Even if the homepage is not the specific page visitors want, Amazon.com has world class site search. Anyone who has spent time on the site is likely to be as comfortable using Amazon.com’s site search as they are using Google or Bing.
Meta Description
Online shopping from the earth’s biggest selection of books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes, jewelry, tools & hardware, housewares, furniture, sporting goods, beauty & personal care, broadband & dsl, gourmet food & just about anything else.
Why would anyone write a 304-character meta description? Usually the only place meta descriptions appear are in the SERP listings. But this is Amazon.com. With millions of affiliates, authors and vendors, it knows the meta description will be copied onto many websites.
Given that fact, it makes sense to include a complete marketing message that will act like a billboard wherever it travels.
H1
There is no H1 element on the homepage.
When you SEO optimize a homepage, do you include a keyword targeted H1 headline? If so, why would Amazon.com not?
Amazon.com’s homepage enjoys massive link authority,
Moz ranks Amazon.com #12 on its list of the web’s most important sites
It has a Page Authority of 97 and Domain Authority of 99
There are 3.6m followed links from 118k root domains to the page
The content on Amazon.com’s homepage changes constantly and it becomes instantly relevant for whatever appears on it.
Perhaps its testers found the presence of an H1 tag
Narrows the page’s relevancy
Prevents the page from appearing in more search results than the page does without an H1
Lowers organic search traffic
Only Amazon.com knows for sure, but you can bet its SEO team tested something as basic as an H1 headline.
Other H# Tags
I will be the first to agree H# tags have limited SEO value, though I like to build pages with thoughtfully optimized H2 and H3 elements.
The headlines on this homepage look written for humans with little regard for search engines.
Rich Snippets
Amazon.com displays a lot of star ratings. And, of course, it has a shopping cart.
As an SEO, this is where you consider placing machine readable markup (e.g., schema.org) in the HTML. I checked the home page, the review page and the product page for The Duchess HD DVD. I only found markup on the canonical URI product page.
This makes sense if you do not want competing rich snippets throughout a website, except I checked a Nikon camera shown on the homepage, and it had no rich snippets in its product page. There seems to be a lack of consistency.
Footer Links
I recommend deep consideration of the footer. This usually means getting rid of gratuitous links.
Look at Amazon.com’s footer.
Every link serves a purpose. Also, when you visit the Amazon.com-owned websites, they do not link back to all these sites, creating a cross-link network.
Still, there are 68 links in the footer. Is Amazon.com trying to send SEO authority to all these sites, or is it demonstrating what a great company it is? Acknowledging that most businesses do not own 12 foreign sites and 35 subsidiaries, most sites should not have 68 footer links.
On-Page Links
According to the web developer toolbar, there are 368 links on the homepage. Though Google dropped its 100-link limit long ago, would you place 368 links on your homepage?
On-Page CSS
There is a huge chunk of CSS in the HTML as well as inline CSS. Most optimizers would move this to an external file.
Final Thoughts
Since going further will descend into nitpicking and minutia, I will stop here, but I hope you see the point: just because a website performs well in search does not make it a good model for another website’s SEO. It can lead to poor decisions that negatively affect rankings and visibility.
I do not want to completely discourage you from looking to Amazon.com or other sites for ideas and inspiration. Just make sure that when you do, you have a strong foundation of knowledge and can critically assess what you find.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)