If you are looking to optimise your e-commerce site to get up the rankings, there are a few strategies you can use. One such strategy which all experts will agree on, is optimising and creating content in the shape of text, audio and even video. Sounds easy enough, however for e-commerce sites it is not always possible.

Here are 8 tips for optimising e-commerce sites through content:

1. Update descriptions often – On top of making your descriptions standout due to their originality, you should also aim to get those pages crawled often by the engines. One way to achieve this is by offering new content within those pages on a regular basis. If you are struggling to find new content to enhance the description, look at your customer support emails. Chances are that users are emailing you questions for information which wasn’t clear so your answers could also be added to the product’s description. eBay for example does this well by allowing sellers to post a buyer’s question and their answer.

2. Use keywords wisely – Using the right keywords in the product descriptions does not mean repeating the same keywords over and over. It is ok to repeat a variation of the keyword a few times or make it bold once or twice, but whatever you do, make sure it reads well. Remember the search engine isn’t your customer, you and I are. If the product description is unique and reads well you’ve ticked all the right boxes.

3. Make all your content accessible - Types of content might be inaccessible to the search engines and therefore for users for a selection of reasons. Especially for e-commerce sites where good content is hard to come by, this represents a missed opportunity. You might feel that the content is so valuable that users must subscribe first to view it, or it is coded in such as way which makes finding the content by the engines very difficult. Content such as help forums, questions and answers pages and even product guides should become accessible as a priority.

4. Keep in mind content ratio – Web content can take many shapes and forms from text to images and even audio. If your traffic goal is to gain traffic from social media sites, perhaps creative content will work well, however to increase search engine rankings text is still preferred. Keep the ration between text and other forms of content favorable towards text, but do continue to offer creative content as well. Hence the emphasis should be on ratio.

5. Avoid copy and paste – It is a common practice for e-commerce sites with many SKUs to take the manufacturer’s product descriptions and copy paste them. By doing so, perhaps you have full product descriptions, however other sites are using the precise same wording making your content secondary. To ensure your content stands out and by doing so you have the best possible chances to rank well, write your own product descriptions or re-write parts of the original description.

6. Encourage content sharing – After working hard to create quality content, you should aim to get your content out there and shared across social media sites and between users alike. The first step after the content creation is to integrate a social sharing button across all your pages, from product pages to how-to guides. There are couple of options you could consider, all are free and easy to integrate. Some offer more back end functionality than others, such as analytic reporting so I would narrow the list to www.addthis.com and www.sharethis.com.

7. Stay current with your content – It’s all fine and well to work on creating quality content, however you want people to look for this content. For e-commerce sites, content is often the products themselves or as some site owners call it, the long tail. Therefore you should look to offer products which are in high demand or those which are projected to grow. Read industry blogs to find out which products are coming to your industry or look at yearly trends using sites such as Google Trends.

8. Pay attention to grammar and spelling – If there’s one thing that will instantly cause the opposite of optimising through content, is displaying poor content. Grammar and spelling mistakes will lower your credibility as a seller and will prevent users from sharing your content. Use a spell checker before uploading any content and consider asking another pair of eyes to go over your work. If users notify you of a mistake in the copy, act quickly to resolve it.

You wake up one morning, open your favorite analytics program and discover that your organic traffic has decreased over night. If you’ve done nothing to violate Google’s terms and conditions it’s quite frustrating. Here’s a useful guide for common reasons of drop in traffic, how to check each one and possible fix.

1. Site IP Address Change – If you haven’t already I’d recommend getting a fix IP address from your host. A change in IP address to one which has been blacklisted or even random changes could undermine your ranking. Keep a record of your IP address on file or use Domain Tools to view your IP address status or IP address history if you haven’t kept a record. The last one is a paid for service.

2. Domain Blacklisted - I hear this often, ‘my domain has been blacklisted’ and almost always it isn’t the case. If you search for site:domain-name in Google and get results, you’re not blacklisted. If you’re getting no results found you might have a problem which could be down to getting blacklisted or even using the robots.txt file incorrectly. You’ll need to get to the bottom of the possible reason and file a reconsideration request. Take this request very seriously, admit what you think might have gone wrong and how you’ve now taken steps to rectify the problem.

3. Outbound Spammy Links – Mostly common for blogs with little or no comment enforcing policy, it might also occur for websites offering user and product reviews with the option to hyperlink. One spammy link getting through the net could see the that page disappear from the index. Start by enforcing a comment / review policy, use spam filters and check your current outbound links using bad neighborhood. Once the offending link has been removed, the page will appear in the index the next time it’s crawled.

4. Aggressive Internal Linking - Leveraging internal linking to optimise your site is a legitimate tactic. For example, internal linking between closely related products will help boost their authority. On the other hand, linking back to your homepage from every page with an optimised anchor text might result in an automated penalty as Rand pointed out. If the drop in traffic happened after you’ve made this change, then revert back.

5. Site Structure Change – I always recommend against doing site-wide structure changes to an existing and well indexed site. If you’ve done this, I guess you had your reasons, still when possible perform structural changes hand in hand with a testing procedure so you’re able to quickly go back to the previous structure. If you suspect your change might help explain the drop in traffic, you can either wait for the engines to fully index the site (that is if you’re 100% certain the change is going to work) or revert back.

6. Misuse of Robots.txt File – The ease in which webmasters and site owners could update the robots.txt file is its great attraction, but also makes this file dangerous at times. Blocking certain pages and directories which previously proved essential to your SEO efforts might help explain drop in traffic in the long tail. If you suspect the robots.txt file might be the cause, analyze it using Google Webmaster tool.

7. Breach of Webmaster Terms and Conditions – If you’ve breached Google’s T&C you’ll need to face the music and try to resolve it. Your first action is to fix the breach and ensure your site complies with the T&Cs. Now you’ll need to file a reconsideration request with the precise action you’ve taken to fully comply with Google and wait a few weeks for an engineer to look at your case. MattCutts of Google suggested recently at PubCon that you might want to look at a new domain and start fresh, though only for very serious cases of violation.

8. Change in Google’s Algorithm – Google constantly changes its algorithm, be it a small update or a major update such as Google Caffeine it might affect your traffic. If such an update does end up affecting your traffic, it will also affect others. Search Google and fine tune the results by date to see if anyone else experienced a change. There’s little you can do in the short time, you need to hope further algorithm tweaks will restore your ranking or you’ll need to optimise your site better in accordance with new update.

9. Your Site Was Hacked - If your site was hacked and injected with scripts and viruses it might disappear from the index or users might be getting a message about malware on your site. There are many checks you can make, but basically you’ll need to fix the hack and file a type of reconsideration request called a malware review of your site. Once again the key is to explain to the engineer looking into your case actions you’ve taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again, from upgrading your software to blocking FTP and running a virus check on your PC.

10. Keyword Penalty – Be in algorithmically or manually you might experience penalty based on a keyword, rather than a site-wide penalty. If you’ve moved on a keyword level over night from page x to page x + 10/20/30 justly or wrongly you’ve probably been penalized. Try and find the reason why, it might be from aggressive anchor text reach internal linking, to a spammy outbound link finding its way through the crack to a Google mistake. The last one can happen when a new site in particular enjoys a large amount of backlinks in a short space of time, it seems unnatural to Google and gets penalized. If you suspect that might be the case, guess what… you’ll need to file a reconsideration request.

11. Seasonal Change – If you’re offering seasonal products or service, don’t be too surprised when your traffic drops. If you’re new to the industry and have little historical information to work on such as using Google Analytics, try using Google Trends for some insights.

12. Pages Dropped From The Index – Large sites with many SKUs are more susceptible to drop in traffic due to certain pages, in particular long tail pages disappearing from the index. This might happen due to content duplication, poor use of the canonical tag or even due to a structural change. Use the site: operator and keep a record of your findings, in particular use the site: operator on a directory level for more precise results i.e. site:site-name.tld/directory/

13. You’ve Lost Some Authority – The last one is tricky to diagnose. If you’ve enjoy links from authoritative sources and those links are now gone for what ever reason, it can influence your ranking over time. You can get a feel for the number of backlinks you have and perhaps their authority if you can recognize names, however the best advice is to keep on building natural quality links.

Hopefully I’ve not missed too many reasons.

Other than a few selected few at the kingdom of Google and co, no one really knows for sure which link gives you more authority, which link is passing juice and which link is discounted straight away. We make assumptions, we test, we analyze, and sometimes we come very close to the actual workings of the engines. If you’ve ever analyzed the backlinks profile of a successful site over a long period of time, you’ll notice that their link building profile looks natural and natural doesn’t only mean little or no paid links but seems at time quite all over the place.

There are over 20 unique backlink factors I’d like to call natural link building indicators which shade light on this type of strategy. Needless to say, as a long term search engine optimisation strategy, natural is good, but it doesn’t mean you can’t gently nudge the strategy your way provided you keep within the guidelines.

20 Indications That Your Link Building is Natural:

1. No paid links, link farms, bad neighborhoods etc

2. Some of the backlinks to the site are image links

3. Some of the image links, dare I say… have no alt text and the image name has nothing to do with the site

4. Some text backlinks will contain your keywords… result!

5. Some of the text backlinks will contain the metadata page title

6. Some of the anchor text might include unoptimized terms such as ‘click here’, ‘find out more, ‘ here’ etc

7. Some of the backlinks are likely coming from bloggers

8. Some of the backlinks are likely coming from forums

9. There’s minimal or no use of directories as an SEO strategy

10. There’s minimal or no use of article submission as an SEO strategy

11. You’ll see a few indications of PR generating some quality backlinks

12. In terms of IP geo location, some of the backlinks will come from territories you’re not really targeting

13. TLDs likely to include some .org  and .edu/.ac will only further help

14. A large percentage of pages linking out to the site will have no or low PR

15. A large percentage of the sites linking out will link from deeper pages… not just the homepage

16. Some links will include foreign language anchor text or surrounding text

17. Some of the links will lead to 404s, it happens some people won’t link correctly so make sure you fix this

18. The number of backlinks is growing constantly

19. Backlinks to the site are spread across many pages, not one or two highly optimized pages

20. Some of the links might come from less reputable sources without your doing, but you’d assume Google knows that and would simply discount those links

You’ll be wise to try and ensure your link building looks as natural as possible, especially if you’re counting on search engine optimisation as a marketing strategy for the long run. Ensure that your content is fresh and update to date, that you have basic tools to share content (a la addthis and co) and that you understand that taking a shortcut right now might mean quick wins, but a poor long term strategy.

Quick wins and search engine optimization, can it be? They say there’s no quick wins in SEO and successful campaigns take time, energy and sometimes some cash. While this is very much true, there are some search engine optimization tips which will almost guarantee quick wins and require very little investment.

1. Find and fix any error pages – These error pages are poor for user experience, poor for the engines and might be a missed opportunity as some might carry page rank or even some authority. To find these pages, type www.sitename.com/<any-non-valid-page> and look at the page title of an error page. Now head to Google Analytics < Content < Content by Title and type the page title in the Filter Page Title box. Click on the page title to find all the error pages you’ve got and fix them. If Google Analytics isn’t tracking your error pages, head to Google Webmaster and verify your site to receive a complete list of error pages (amongst other useful info).

2. Check for images without alt text and fix this – Alt text for images is becoming very important for SEO and recent tests show that it carries as much if not more weight than an H1 tag. Juicy Studio has a free tool for checking alt text and other issues.

3. Rename your images using a descriptive phrase – I often see product and service images with odd naming conventions such as sitename.com/images/6799_98.jpg. Renaming your images using a keyword rich phrase such as sitename.com/images/product-name.jpg will help with image search traffic. Use a free tool such as xenu to find all your images and their naming conventions.

4. Use AdWords to test the best page title in terms of CTR – While you might be slightly lower than your competitor for a particular keyword, you are able to match the overall diversity of clicks by opting for a great call to action page title. Why AdWords? using rotating ads function in AdWords you are able to source the best Ad creative and apply its call to action for page title, for example <key terms> < call to action> :: <brand> or Blue Widgets Exclusive Deals :: Site Name

5. Start spending more time creating content – Chances are you’re spending most of your SEO efforts on link building in the shape of directories, social sites, link requests etc, however great content can often be more productive for link building. Start spending at least 10% of your time creating how to guides, on line tutorials, video demos, editorial reviews etc. You’ll find that great content will get those natural links the engines just love.

Bonus tip – If you haven’t already, install a social bookmark button such as Add to Any across your site. Links from social bookmarking sites and other social properties are another example of natural links which are seen very favorably by the engines.

We’ve recently optimised a version of Interspire shopping cart for a client. Going forward the client’s requirements were to manage their SEO in house so we wanted to find a stable shopping cart which is search engine friendly (well… as much as possible) and build on that. We quickly came across Patrick’s review of Interspire so thought we’ll give our first hand review of Interspire shopping cart in terms of its SEO potential divided into available features and those lacking.

Available SEO features

1. Images retain their image name so blue-widget.jpg when uploaded to the product keeps its file name
2. Images are kept by default in a folder level (some shopping carts use a sub-domain which is less effective for SEO)
   
3. Breadcrumb navigation is available by default
4. Basic XML site map is generated by default
5. Under specific server configuration, search engine friendly URLs are available so it will look something like www.sitename.com/products/blue-widgets.html
6. Page titles for products are created based on [product name - store name] and there’s also an option to overwrite the default option and add page title, page description and keyword for each product
7. Site architecture allows the engines to easily crawl the site as it’s based on sitename.com/categories/category-name/ and sitename.com/directory/product-name.html for products
8. Basic Google Analytics integration is present
9. There’s plenty of options to add quality content on a category or product level
10. Featured products rotate increasing the appearance of fresh content
    

Lacking SEO features

1. Product images have no alt text
2. HTML site map is missing
3. There’s no use of H1 across the site which we found very odd, especially for product titles
   
4. While there’s an option to write unique page title and description for products, this option is lacking for HTML static pages as the page title is generated from the file name
5. There’s no option to nofollow pages, unless you’re coding the tag in the template (guess it’s old news now)
6. There’s no real solution for pagination and content duplication issues, such as canonical tag or use of # instead of ? so if you have 2 pages under one category, you’ll face some content duplication issues. We’d expect categories with sitename.com/categories/category-name/?page=<Y> to have a canonical tag back to sitename.com/categories/category-name/
7. There’s no robots.txt file control by default
8. Homepage URL by default is www.sitename.com/index.php which requires 2 minute work in the .htaccess file to redirect to www.sitename.com
9. The ability to redirect the URL of products which have been removed from the site to their main category would have been nice (some default rule instead of using the .htaccess file)

If the people at Interspire manage to add some of the lacking features, it might just be the ultimate shopping cart in terms of SEO.

If you’re hiring an SEO agency, or have the time and knowledge to optimize your site in house, here are some tell tale sighs it’s working. SEO is very much a long term strategy so you’ll expect to see long term results, though there are some short term results which will tell you if you’re likely to prevail.

20 Indications That Your SEO Efforts Are Working Out (or not)

Short Term

1. Links to homepage – As your highest authority page, you’d expect to drive much of the new link building to this page.

2. Links to entire domain – Smart link building will spread over various target pages so you’ll expect to see an overall uplift in the total in bound links pointing to the domain.

3. Number of pages indexed (Google) – Chances are that before the SEO work began, some pages where missing from the index or hidden under the dreaded supplement results.

4. Number of pages indexed (Yahoo) – Same as above, you’d expect to see an uplift in indexed pages.

5. Number of content duplication pages – Once metadata (and maybe some smart 301 / canonical tag work) you’d expect to see less duplicate content issues.

6. Number of pages missing metadata – Each page should have targeted metadata.

7. Number of content pages (ex about us, privacy policy etc) – Intelligent SEO is always about making more great content available on your site, so any decent SEO effort should include the creation of fresh new content which is optimized around your goals.

8. Intervals between Google’s page crawl (in days) – After cleaning some of your HTML code and introducing new content regularly, you’d expect to see an increase in crawl rate which means that your new content will get indexed quicker.

9. Outbound links – Important for SEO, you’ll need to link to added value industry authoritative resources.

Long Term

10. [Keyword 1] rank – You’d expect to see your site ranking higher for these competitive terms.
- [Keyword 2] rank – As above.
- Etc…

11. Traffic from image search (in unique visitors) – After optimizing your images in terms of alt text, image name, size etc you should be getting some image love from the engines. Not great for increasing revenue, but an indication that you’re on the right course.

12. Homepage Page Rank – More authority links, smart use of nofollow, redirect etc and page rank should increase.

13. Number of pages with Page Rank - You’d expect due to the homepage page rank increase to see more pages with page rank.

14. Number of pages getting traffic from the search engines – More of your site pages should be getting traffic from the engines (look for landing pages in Google Analytics).

15. Overall uplift in traffic (in %) - The goal of your search engine optimisation work should include increasing overall traffic.

16. Uplift in traffic from search engines – Mainly due to increase ranking of established pages, you should see an increase of organic traffic.

17. Uplift in traffic from social networking sites – If you’ve created great shareable content and used one of the social bookmarking smartly, you should see an increase in social traffic.

18. Total .edu links to domain – Getting links is very much where they come from so you’d expect some high authority links

19. Total .gov links to domain – As above

20. Uplift in sales (in %) - The holey grail

Try to take a snapshot of each indication at the start, mid way and end of the campaign to compare results and optimize your efforts further.

Looking for an ethical SEO agency? get in touch with us today.

Link building is one the key factors of successful SEO and it takes time and patience. Luckily the search engines offer plenty of search operators which makes this task just a bit easier. Here are my top 10 ways to use search engine operators for SEO:

MSN

1. linkfromdomain operator: Use this operator to see who you’re linking to and to ensure you’re not linking out to a questionable source aka bad neighborhood. For example, you can do a straight forward search by typing [linkfromdomain:examplesite.com] or a more comprehensive questionable source search by typing [linkfromdomain:examplesite.com + spammy term]

Yahoo

2. Links to domain – Use this operator to find the total number of sites linking to the entire domain [linkdomain:examplesite.com -site:examplesite.com], or do a more specific search and find the total number of sites linking to a particular page [link:examplesite.com/page.html -site:examplesite.com]

3. Mentions of site without a link back – Use this operator to find sites mentioning your domain but who haven’t linked to it. In Yahoo type [examplesite -linkdomain:http://www.examplesite.com]. Once found contact the site owners or webmaster and ask for a link back.

4. Mentions of name without a link back to your site – Use this operator to find sites mentioning your name but who haven’t linked to your site. In Yahoo type [First name + Last name -linkdomain:http://www.examplesite.com]. Once found contact the site owners or webmaster and ask for a link back.

5. Site:.edu OR Site:.gov operator – Use this operator to find edu or gov domain links which is particularly useful for competitor analysis. Type [link:http://www.examplesite site:.edu OR site:.gov]. View who links to your competitors, analyze their strategy and try to get a link as well.

6. Region operator – Use this operator to find domain links by region which is an important contributor to where your site is placed in Google various search engine properties i.e. google.co.uk, google.de etc (just one of the considerations together with IP address, domain tld, physical address etc). Type [link:http://www.examplesite.com region:europe] (play between europe, asia, northamerica etc)

Google

7. Site operator – Use site: operator to find how many pages Google has indexed by typing [site:examplesite.com].  The deeper you can go, the better the results will be. For example, [site:examplesite.com/directory/] will provide more accurate results.

8. Related operator – Use this operator to find out in which ‘club’ Google has placed your site by typing [related:examplesite.com]

9. Inurl operator – Use this operator to find relevant keywords together with link opportunities. For example, for quality link opportunities type [Keyword inurl:links|resources]

10. Intitle operator – Use this operator together with Inurl operator to find relevant link opportunities by typing [keyword intitle: "suggest site"|"suggest url"|"submit site"|"Add link"]

Start building your links today.

I recently looked back at some of the SEO reports we’ve done here at Conversion Counts and some SEO mistakes kept surfacing up. While a few mistakes are down to lack of knowledge which is totally acceptable, other mistakes are because there’s been an attempt to save where saving should not have been made, for example on quality hosting, dedicated IP address etc.

30 common SEO mistakes:

1. Not paying enough attention to content duplication issues
2. Having multiple domains all showing the same website version, not knowing that Google is smart and will simply disregard the all but one domain
3. Not paying a bit extra for quality dedicated hosting package
4. Not investing enough resources into creating quality content
5. Targeting too many keywords on page (or even worse, keyword stuffing)
6. Not targeting the right keywords due to lack of strategy
7. Using doorway pages which quickly disappear from the index
8. Creating content for the engines, not for the users
9. Using only images as the site navigation
10. When images are used, there’s little use of alt text or optimized image names
11. Using a non-crawlable JavaScript navigation
12. Not using metadata such as page title and description
13. Missing the connection between great design and SEO
14. Having a flash website intro (splash page)
15. Having a flash site all together
16. Not maintaining the code which results in site errors
17. Submitting the site to 1000 junk directories
18. Counting on link exchange schemes as a link building strategy
19. Using blog comments and news groups to spread spam links
20. Considering (even for a second) answering that email which promised #1 position on Google for £99
21. Opting for a cheap shopping cart software which cannot be customized
22. Blocking important parts of the site using the robots.txt file not as it was meant to be used
23. No following important pages which were passing link juice before
24. Having multiple versions of the homepage
25. Allowing both non www and www versions to resolve without using a 301 redirect
26. Forgetting about site maps (HTML and XML)
27. Missing the connection between site analytics and great SEO
28. Checking search engine ranking every day (or couple of times a day)
29. Optimising the site for PageRank… why?
30. Hosting a blog away from the main site instead of hosting it on the site as a directory

- – - – -

Other great resources:

SEOMoz Blog – 12 Easy Mistakes That Plague Newcomers to the SEO Field

Search Engine Land – SEO “Don’ts”: 20 Fatal Mistakes You Must Avoid To Succeed

Building links is essential for great search engine optimisation results and while a handful of quality links might work for one site, another site might need hundreds to show any results.

Here are 10 link building tactics I’ve had some great experience with:

1. Turn your stock photography into creative commons – The idea is to take model images and product images you own and might have used in previous years and submit them under creative commons to stock photography sites such as www.sxc.hu. If asked, most users will mention the source in their credits so place a clear call to action asking to mention the source.

2. Offer a set of free web icons – Sites such as IconPot.com list a whole range of icons which are great for web development projects. They we only list icons which you can use for free on personal AND commercial projects AND without having to provide back-links/credit to the author. By offering a set of quality icons for free, you’ll notice that users will be happy to mention the source even though they’re not required too. To make the links as relevant as possible offer industry related icons.

3. Google search operator – You can use Google search operator to find quality directories and sites to submit your links. You’ll need to search a combination of searches for each keyword using keyword “submit url” / keyword “add url” / keyword “suggest url” / keyword “suggest site” / keyword “add site” / keyword “add website” / keyword “submit site” so for blue widgets, you’ll need to search Google for [blue widgets “submit url” / blue widgets “add url” / blue widgets "suggest url" / blue widgets "suggest site" / blue widgets “add site” / blue widgets “add website” / blue widgets "submit site"]

4. Do a guest post – Write a guest post relevant to your industry and normally you’ll get a link back to your site. To find guest post opportunities, search for relevant blogs or use the Google search operator [keyterm intitle:guest+blog+post]

5. How to guide – Write a short 10 step how to guide on a topic relevant to your industry and share your content. Mashable has a great list of How To Guides worth checking.

6. Redirect your 404 pages – Check your Google Webmaster and Google Analytics accounts for error pages and 301 redirect them to a more appropriate page.

7. Search for your domain take 1 – Search for sites, blogs and news stories mentioning your site by name, but haven’t linked to you and ask them to link to your site. To find these mentions, search Yahoo for [examplesite -linkdomain:examplesite.com]

8. Search for your domain take 2 – Search for website who mention your site using the anchor text ‘click here’, ‘find out more’ and ask them to revise the hyper link. You should bear in mind that some ‘click here’ links are needed as you don’t want the anchor text to appear over optimised so choose your battles carefully.

9. Get active! – Start participating and answering on topic questions at Yahoo answers and Google Groups.

10. Add fresh content regularly – Top 10 lists are a great start to generate quality content, for example [intitle:10 site:www.conversioncounts.com]

Start building your links today

A good SEO health check should highlight any areas in need of improvement and recommendations for future optimisation. It should also identify ways to improve your website’s search engine rankings and would normally cost you some hard earn cash. To create a basic SEO health check report, use only your typing skills by following the list below:

1. Type [site:sitename.com] query into Google to find any possible penalties. If you’re coming up first great, otherwise you might be suffering a penalty which will require your immediate attention

2. Open your browser and type sitename.com (no www), if you’re redirected to www.sitename.com great, otherwise you’re running two versions of your website. For example, you’ll notice that conversioncounts.com will redirect to www.conversioncounts.com. To find any non www version of your pages in the index, use [site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www] in Google

3. Check that the server header is returning a 301 redirect response, not a 302 or 200 by testing your sitename.com (no www) version using a server header checker tool

4. If the server header does return either a 200 or 302 for the non www version, and you’re running php use this handy guide by the people at Apache to resolve it using .htacess file

5. Open your browser and type sitename.com/index.php|asp|html|etc, if you’re redirected to www.sitename.com (without /index.php|asp|html|etc) great, otherwise you might have content duplication issues as you haven’t standardized your default pages. The people at atvirante offer an automated tool to check some basic page standardization and content duplication issues which I recommend for basic testing

6. Optimising your images is essential for SEO so you’ll want to ensure all your images have their appropriate alt text, image name etc. Use Juicy Studios’ image analyzer tool to learn more about your image optimisation issue

7. Clean up your links and check that you’re not linking to infected or spammy sites by typing [linkfromdomain:sitename.com + <spammy term>] at www.msn.com.

8. Head deeper and look at one category page and one title page (or product page). If you’re seeing unique page title and description great, otherwise you’ll find it very hard to rank for the long tail

9. Are you using underscore to separate keywords in your URLs, for example, www.sitename.com/blue_widgets/? Change them to hyphens www.sitename.com/blue-widgets/

10. Check your link popularity across social bookmarking sites using an automated tool such as popuri and consider adding social bookmark buttons across the site such as addtoany.com or addthis.com

This check list should take 10 to 15 minutes to complete and will provide you with some useful information about your SEO health.