A to Z Guide for Holiday Ecommerce SEO

The holiday season is upon us, which means that your ecommerce site needs to be prepared to "deck the halls" of search engines with their products.
My early gift to you is an (almost) A to Z guide of SEO tips and tricks designed to optimize ecommerce sites to prevent them from landing on the search engines' naughty lists.

Auto fill forms where possible (when you have the information), and provide drop downs and selection fields to make it as easy as possible to fill out.

Build text for users into every page, where it makes sense, to support a well-defined content strategy.

Create custom dashboards in Google Analytics for ecommerce-specific metrics' reporting.

Don't have unique pages for small product variations. Instead, list small variations within main the product page.

Ensure titles and meta data are unique, descriptive, and to improve both user understanding and search results' page engagement.

Focus on URL structures that are readable and logical for both users and search engines.

Give reviews visibility and prominence on the site.

Have product sun setting and out of stock strategies in place to reduce 'page not found' errors.

Integrate social sharing options (not just social profile icons) into your site, especially on products, categories, buying guides, and content pages that host shareable content.

Kill thin pages that have little value to users and, instead, redirect to relevant pages that do provide value.

Link to popular products from your home page. Rotate bestsellers and random products in homepage linking modules too.

Markup on-page entities and product attributes using schema.org, or other ontology guidance.

Source url : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319418/Holiday-Ecommerce-SEO-The-Almost-A-to-Z-Guide