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:

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

On-page SEO for eCommerce

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 compilation of the best action-focused articles and posts on eCommerce, tagged and collated so I can find them quickly myself.

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

Store finders should be great, but usually aren’t (Google’s usually better!). Read these for some great insights into how to make them better:

Social and Community features are all the rage. Frankly, I think most eCommerce sites would be better diverting some of their social marketing efforts to fixing their basic site usability. But assuming that’s nailed, here’s some great resources on best practice social commerce

SEO for eCommerce sites isn’t as complicated as your agency would have you believe. Read these and the clouds should begin to lift: