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July 23, 2010 by Stephan Spencer

For this month’s “SEO Report Card,” I thought I would do something different and review a site that didn’t request it. The site I chose, Woot.com, is near and dear to my heart. I’m an avid Wooter, and have been for the last few years.

Whats Woot.com?

Woot.com is a very special ecommerce site: It sells only one product per day. Granted it has several spin-off sites now, such as Wine.woot.com and Shirt.woot.com, but still the premise across the main site and the spin-offs remains the same: Only one product is for sale on a given day, and when that product sells out, there is nothing else to sellat least not until midnight Central Time (U.S.), when the next day’s product is unveiled. (There are exceptions, as any Wooter will tell you, like when there is a Woot-off.) It’s brilliant marketing that uses scarcity to drive impulse purchases. Speaking from experience as a Woot customer, I’ve been way too impulsive way too often.

Woot’s been in the news lately. It was just acquired by Amazon, if you hadn’t already heard. This was really the impetus for me to feature it in this month’s “SEO Report Card.” Amazon.com is arguably one of the best-optimized ecommerce sites on the planet. And yet Woot.com sits on the other end of the spectrum. Dare we call it anti-SEO?

Woot.com: SEO Video Overview

Home Page, Secondary Pages

Woot’s unique business model poses a significant challenge for search engine optimization. There is no online catalog full of SKUs to present to the search engines. Nor is there an array of categories and sub-categories with keyword themes to target. Even the home page is lacking a stable keyword theme. The home page is where the day’s deal is presented, so the entire page copy changes out every night at midnight. So what’s there to optimize? Plenty. Specifically, thousands of blog posts and tens of thousands of discussion forum posts, the latter being user-generated content that Woot didn’t even have to pay for. Each of these pages is sitting in Google’s index, ready and waiting to deliver searchers to Woot’s door. Unfortunately, most of these pages aren’t currently targeting any keyword themes. At least there’s nothing worth targeting. (What do you reckon “Woot: The Community: Woots: Random Crap” is targeting?)

What’s the point of attracting a Google searcher to the site from a months-old blog post that talks about a product that is no longer available for sale? The point is to get this prospect onto Woot’s list. Once the prospect is on their list, Woot has permission to start and maintain a dialogue with that prospect, and to turn him or her into a rabid fan. Every blog post, indeed every page of the site, should be treated like it’s a “squeeze page.”

Keyword Choices

What would be “head” terms for Woot? “Deals” and related keywords like “last minute deals.” I don’t think “bargains” is as good as “deals,” but it’s a decent candidate. Perhaps even “electronics” and/or “gear.” The home page should be retooled so that it targets one or more of these head terms as its keyword focus. (“Last minute deals and bargains in electronics and gear,” for instance.) Right now, the primary keyword focus for the home page is its brand name and its tag. It’s unnecessary to target the “Woot” brand as a keyword focus because it’s impossible for Woot.com to not rank number 1 for that keyword, due to the strength of its domain authority and the “Woot” containing anchor text of the inbound links. And, of course, no one searches for a company’s tagline, except perhaps for the company’s CEO.

Title Tags

Incidentally, the first word of every title tag is “Woot” across the entire site. This I would definitely change; it’s prime wasted real estate that should be occupied by the page’s primary keyword theme.

How about “Long Tail” terms? There are plenty of those to target. Any product that they had sold in the past and blogged about, like “Motorola hs820 bluetooth headset” would be a good candidate. Woot’s already is doing a reasonable job targeting names of past-featured products in title tags. Too bad these pages are dead-ends that don’t compel the searcher to do anything but hit the back button.

“Torso” terms are in between the head and the Long Tailnot quite popular enough to be considered a head term, but not esoteric and rarely searched for, either. A great example of this would be “roomba,” an oft-returning product to Woot.com that no self-respecting geek should be without. (It’s a robot vacuum cleaner.)

Now that Amazon owns Woot, it makes even more sense that it ranks for terms such as “roomba” because it can direct incoming search traffic to the Roomba category on Amazon (as well as any related deals listed on the Deals.woot.com aggregator site).

Summary

In all, the Woot.com site is a diamond in the roughwith a ton of textual content (the prose is some of the funniest you’ll ever see on an ecommerce site). In my view, that content could easily be tweaked to drive much more search traffic and many more conversions, such as opt-ins, if not actual purchases.

SEO REPORT CARD

WOOT.COM

Home Page Content D

Inbound Links and PageRank A-

Indexation A

Internal Hierarchical Linking Structure C-

HTML Templates and CSS A-

Secondary Page Content C-

Keyword Choices C

Title Tags C+

URLs C+

OVERALL GPA C+

Read Stephan Spencer’s profile. >

SEO home page, keyword focus, keyword theme, SEO Report Card

Google is the main source of traffic for most of the sites and search engine optimization (SEO) plays vital role in getting that. There are lot many myths about SEO which doesnt work or creates confusion for webmasters. But here is a SEO Report Card created by people from Google for good SEO practice by providing a report card of Googles Product pages (taken as example). With the help of this Report Card and description provided in this Ebook, one can understand SEO in a better way.

Googles SEO Report Card is a nice work done by Brandon Falls, Adi Goradia, and Charlene Perez where they have explained different terms of on-page optimization and search result presentation. They have explained simple points but believe me they are very much effective in getting traffic from search engines like Google. For example, Post Title and Description tag plays very important role in getting traffic. WordPress users may use All in one SEO plugin to achieve the same within minutes. Even your post is appearing on the first page of SERP, if that is not having proper title and description, people will avoid your link to click. There are lot many tips like this is available in this 49 pages PDF.

Download Googles SEO Report Card

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While ostensibly aimed at helping Google target potential weaknesses in its own product pages, and of no direct use to SEOs,
there is nonetheless more than a little gold to be found here, if one just examines the document in a little more depth. So
while the post
at Google’s Webmaster Central Blog is already beginning to bristle with comments lamenting the fact that this isn’t a
clear treasure map to the search-ranking mother lode, it’s worth sifting through the Report Card to see what informational
nuggets are hidden inside.

Subject I: Search Result Presentation

It’s easy to see why some readers simply dismissed this document
out of hand, as the first section starts off being little more
than a rehash of the standard “Use Page Titles, Use Meta
Descriptions” advice found in any SEO-101 manual. Only by
persevering to the part talking about Google Sitelink
Triggering, does one begin to suspect that there may be a little
more to the report card than meets the eye. Here the authors
throw out a couple of crumbs about categorizing website and
link-structure, and consolidating a site’s URLs to maximize its
informational focus with the aim of increasing the chances of
Google generating Sitelinks.

Even so, it’s nothing most professionals haven’t heard before,
and I suspect that by this time a lot of readers had given up,
thinking that nothing interesting was in store.

Subject II: URLs and Redirects

This is where we see a little glitter among the rubble, as the
section starts off with the statement that: “Google products’
URLs take many different forms. Most larger products use a
subdomain, while smaller ones usually use a directory form…”

In itself this is not an exceptional statement, and the chapter
continues to give handy, but hardly unique, information about
canonicalization, URL structure, and redirects until Page 10,
where we find the following declaration:

“Subdomains require an extra DNS lookup, slightly affecting
latency, which is very important at Google.”

Page load-speeds are an important factor to Google. There’s been
talk and speculation about this ever since Matt Cutts dropped
the first hints last year, and these days most SEOs are busily
proclaiming that slow websites are now a handicap.

Haven’t they always been?

Be that as it may, this fact is not common knowledge with the
average webmaster, as demonstrated by a question I’m regularly
confronted with over at the Google Webmaster Help Forum:

“Which is a better way to categorize my site, subdomains or
folders?”

The standard answer to this question used to be “Whichever you
prefer” before load-times became an issue. Now, however, we find
a clear indicator that a folder-based approach is
much-preferable unless a category actually contains enough
information to merit its own site, which is effectively what a
subdomain turns it into.

Subject III: On-Page Optimizations

While at first glance this chapter is more standard SEO-101
fodder, it’s where we find a sizable nugget, as the report talks
about semantic markup, and how Google uses it to gauge a page’s
content.

“Nothing new here; we all use H1 tags.” you might say, but you’d
only be partially right, because this issue not only runs much
deeper than H1 headings, it runs beyond Heading tags altogether,
as I’ll explain shortly. For the moment, however, let’s stay
with them.

In the past few years, a great many Optimizers have reached the
conclusion that only H1, and, to a degree, H2 are of any
promotional value, and that lesser headings (H3 H6) carry
practically no weight at all. But let’s take a look at the
following statement, taken from Page 38 of the Report:

“Most product main pages have an opportunity to use one
tag, like the example above, but they’re currently only using
other heading tags ( in this case) or larger font styling.
While styling your text so it appears larger might achieve the
same visual presentation, it does not provide the same
semantic meaning to the search engine that an tag does.”

For starters it’s obvious that the lesser headings are alive and
well, and being used by Google. We’re also told that Google does
not, or cannot, judge the visual-context meaning of CSS styled
text. The conclusion is to use more heading tags instead of CSS
styles wherever your content calls for it. However, there’s more
to it still. Let’s take another look at part of that statement:

“…but they’re currently only using other heading tags…”

It would appear that Google still places greater value on other
semantic markup tags (em, strong, blockquote, etc.) than many
professionals give them credit for these days. Otherwise why
would the author specifically note the fact that Google only
uses headings and font styles?

I personally know quite a few professionals who have long-since
abandoned most semantic markup tags in favour of CSS style,
since the prevailing attitude of designers and SEOs has been
that making text bold or italic no longer carries much
promotional weight, following widespread abuses in the mid-2000s
and Google’s consequent algorithm updates.

And although the above statement may be a tentative one, it
might just point the way back to a more HTML-based approach to
web design. Indeed, if it can be taken at face-value, it’s
entirely possible that those SEOs and designers advocating
CSS-based, table-less design as the way forward are barking up
the wrong tree. Whatever the case may be, there is undoubtedly
more to the SEO Report Card than first meets the eye, and at the
very least, there is a little gold to be extracted from the mass
of standard information. Only by reading the full document will
you be able to make an assessment yourself.

What should also be remembered is that the SEO Report Card is
not aimed at high-flying SEOs or E-lebrity industry pundits, but
at the intermediate webmaster for whom even the report’s basic
information is of immense value, if read alongside Google’s SEO
Starter Guide.

SEO Google Webmaster Help, semantic markup tags, SEO Report Card, site's search engine