Best Practice eCommerce

tl;dr:

1. Make awesome product pages
2. Devise unique, genius products
3. Get the price wrong “accidentally”
4. Make it embeddable
5. Understand how best competitors are getting links
6. Make “Instructographics” - how-to guides
7. Reward users for sharing
8. Build something valuable … then give it away
9. Translate good content & use internationally
10. Scale outreach/ guest blogging
11. Write beautiful articles, make great content
12. Find-out who’s linked to products already; tell them about new products
13. Clean-up dead links

tl;dr:

• Build creative category pages, e.g. http://producten.hema.nl/
• Make product pages linkbait , e.g. http://www.threadless.com/product/844/Spoilt
• Have sales/ deals pages e.g. http://www.sephora.com/promo/besample/storeoffer.pdf
• Give away personalised gifts, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVCoM4ao2Tw
• Run contests that need a backlink
• Shoot high-quality product images
• Build teasers for new product launches
• Consider other audiences with your blog: who else might be interested in your story, beyond your existing customers?
• Guest blog
• Tell personal stories, e.g. http://vimeo.com/31455885
• Get creative, like Dollar Shave Club

tl;dr:

• Get bloggers to review products
• Sponsorship
• Write guest blog posts
• Linkbait on product pages
• Have the most informative product pages
• Giveaways/ contests that encourage page visits
• Just ask for link (for example in confirmation email)
• Don’t put dates in URLs - keep them ‘evergreen’
• Crowdsource/ design contests
• 301 dead pages
• Store pages
• On-site hosted affiliate pages (with care)
• Social sharing
• Analyse competitors backlinks to product/ category pages
• Sales on categories/ products
• Relevant widgets for others’ blogs (bit iffy?)
• Outrageous(ly expensive) products
• Old-fashioned PR

tl;dr:

1. Add reviews
2. Add videos
3. Add Q&A
4. Social share buttons … maybe
5. Add site search
6. Clear call-to-action above fold
7. Display trustmarks
8. Use breadcrumbs
9. Big image
10. META title tag (& description tag)
11. Unique description
12. Exclude category from product URL - example.com/product-name not example.com/category/product-name
13. Product name = H1
14. Company name

And:

1. Manage pagination: rel=next etc.
2. Page speed
3. Facebook OG tags

13 site search tips for eCommerce from eConsultancy

SLI Systems provide great books full of tips for improving site search and product navigation. This one covers the latter. 

A good selection of ideas from Get Elastic on order-confirmation pages