We've all heard that "content is king", and it's just as true for an e-commerce site as it is for a news site, blog, or any other website. But one of the common myths in e-commerce is that it's good enough to throw up a two-sentence description and a bland image from the product manufacturer, and all is well.

However, if you're actually trying to SELL something, or to drive traffic through search engines, or both, it's incredibly beneficial to take a look at beefing up the content on your site's product pages.

Many of you who know me or regularly read this blog probably know that last December, my husband and I sold our online toy store so that we could focus entirely on our e-commerce practice. The new owners seem to be doing really well with the site, and I'm glad to not have to focus on the day-to-day business anymore - I always liked working on the website much more than running the business. But in addition to the toy store, we also had a drop-ship site for children's furniture that we had started as a second line of income for that business.

Most marketers know by now that social bookmarking sites such as Digg offer huge benefits. In and of themselves, they can drive huge amounts of traffic (into the 10's of thousands from a single frontpage story on Digg), as well as sometimes providing a one-way dofollow link to help your SEO efforts.

The benefit extends beyond Digg's site itself, however. The more people discover your content through social bookmarking sites, the more people you have writing about you, linking to you, and subscribing to you.

Niche stores that focus on a small range of products have a luxury of often being able to limit their top-level categories to a few choices. An old rule of thumb was to aim for seven choices in any navigation menu, based on Miller's Law, which states that the human mind can only remember 7 (plus or minus 2) items in a list. Although usability expert Jakob Nielsen refuted this idea back in 2009, there's still a limit on the number of entries your site should have in its main navigation...if nothing else, the choices must be limited by the size of the customer's computer screen!

So how do larger stores manage to display their breadth of navigation choices while still having a usable website? Let's take a look at some examples.

Internet users have always been wary of providing personal and financial information online, but as the web has grown, so has the number of transactions, as well as the number of sites seeking orders for products or services. Customers have grown more accustomed to providing their information to many kinds of businesses, but privacy concerns continue to grow. In the wake of the recent concerns about privacy on Facebook, I wanted to focus on the privacy of e-commerce site customers as well.