For your reference:

• http://moz.com/community/q/is-it-ok-to-use-encoded-special-characters-in-meta-titles
• http://moz.com/community/q/are-ampersands-in-title-tags-helpful-or-harmful
• http://moz.com/community/q/using-commas-in-the-tittle-tag

The general thought is that they will take up valuable ranking landscape, since your title lengths are limited to begin with.

watch?v=jHSqLYUPq8w

Ontolo has had this feature set up for quite some time. You simply have to set it up and it will keep clean records of OSE data.

Optimize things for search the same as Google, but with added info. For example, instead of just saying "iPhone 5 case," try using something product-specific, like, "natural cherry wood iphone 5 case."

Quality of info, categorization,and images is very important to Amazon, so don't cut corners. Beyond that, definitely get into Amazon's ad service to display your products. Just speaking from my/our experiences, this has helped a lot! After all of that, it comes down to user trust, etc. Think like a shopper. What do you want to see? Cost savings. High-quality imagery and information. Lots of reviews. LOTS of positive reviews.

To increase the review rate, I would suggest doing these two things:

• Leave a printed card in every box you ship to customers asking for reviews with a short url pointing to the appropriate product review page.
• Set up a dynamic email response to automatically send 10 days after shipping the product (after the sale, after the customer receives the product, whatever you want) asking the customer to leave a review on the product and your store/company.

There is no way to determine that, not unless you have access to the code and can verify the footprint the .html upload verification process leaves behind. For audit purposes, we just verify that a sitemap exists.. not whether or not it has been uploaded.

Best course of action is to talk to them.. ask them. Then, if they haven't, go ahead and work with them setting it up.