Panda vs. Human: Advanced eCommerce SEO & UX

Speakers:
Greg Nudelman, CTO, Design Caffeine Inc.
Jaimie Sirovich, CTO, SEO Egghead Inc.

Sliders for Robots Pandas

Instead of sliders, use a single-level tree
Create hierarchy of values based on string prefixes, numerical ranges, etc.

K-I-S-S
Use the simplest form of search refinement

BOOK: Designing Search

Search landing pages from Amazon.com shows products, but also refined search

Show pandas and humans both products and facet filter states

Create Facet enabled landing pages

Yoast landing pages for magneto – blog post. ECommerce platforms that support facet enabled landing pages: endeca

Don’t make me thinkdrill

Don’t force user to make ambiguous and frustrating category decisions

Faceted allows

Avoid useless, superfluous content

Humans have intent, robots don’t.

Googles new parameter tool. Allows you to indicate which URL parameters filter content. Not very helpful at the moment, but allows you to tell robot to ignore specific parameters, but doesn’t help you with bing. Better solution would have been to allow option in robots.txt, but not an option right now.

Avoid multiple URL structures for the same results.

AJAX doesn’t create indexable pages.

Why not just use KW search pages?

• search doesn’t allow easy exploration
• google frowns on it
• there are better ways

multiple select pretty much rulez

• decide on your filter-value selection paradigm
• understand the difference between multiple select and drill-down, don’t use both

Provide an obvious way to undo selections, but don’t present too many options. Don’t make filters disappear, make them all easily accessible.

watch your logs for things you won’t find in your analytics

Your category landing pages should have faceted search filters.

facet-enabled search crumbs

Integrated faceted breadcrumb (IFB) maintains hierarchical order, labels breadcrumb aspects and directs keyword manipulation.

Makes pivoting very easy. Holds the promise to become the key component in the next generation of intuitive finding interfaces that fully integrate the best of faceted search.

If you want to implement IFB, you have to think about how a robot is going to deal with it. URL should match the breadcrumbs, but don’t persist all filters through the URL or you’ll create a large spider trap.

• pandas and humans do agree on a few things
• when they disagree you need to pay attention