Many site owners will employ an SEO company to complete some on page SEO work. This will involve improving the sites information architecture to increase the sites listings in the search engines. This can involve work such as

• Adding dynamic meta data
• Removing duplicate content
• Addition of content, possibly a blog system
• Implementing canonical URLs
• Changing the navigation
• Plus much more…

SEO of course does not finish there, your site will be ever evolving especially if you have an ecommerce site selling products online. In order to ensure that your site’s SEO is still optimised as well as possible you should be also undertaking regular site checks they include:

Checking Pages can be Indexed
Search engines can often have trouble indexing the lower levels of your site, this can be due to navigation problems, your server is slow, or a possible penalisation reducing the amount of pages indexed by Google on your site. This can be monitored by adding many sites maps across your site and submitting them to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. For example you should create a different set of sitemaps for categories and sub categories of your ecommerce site. Google will then provide you with the following information:

• URLs in sitemap – How many URLs are in the sitemap
• Indexed URLs – How many URLs have been indexed

This will give you a good idea as to where any problems arrise, you can then work on the best ways of fixing the issues and getting all your pages indexed.

Canonicalisation
One method of increasing internal link strength and reduce duplicate content is to specify the canonical tag on your URLs. As your website is changing often you may find that your redirect rules have been removed, or the canonical tags have been removed. It is always worth checking canonical URLs in the site, perhaps the most common are URLs indexed with and without the trailing slash, upper and lower case duplication issues, and old unfriendly URLs which have not been properly 301 redirected to their new page.

Duplicate Meta Data
Perhaps one of the most easiest things to diagnose is duplicate meta data in the site. Simply go to your Google Webmaster Tools account then click on HTML suggestions. Google will supply you with a break down of any duplicate meta data (see image below)

Duplicate meta data general means that your dynamic page templates are missing a meta data section. Most of the time this can be resolved by adding meta data into the database and calling this within the of the pages. This exercise although quite simple to undertake can help increase your long tail traffic, especially for large ecommerce sites.

Site Speed
There have been many blogs and post recently talking about Google introducing site loading speed into its algorithm, to me these stories make sense, Google want to show the best possible result to a user, and a slow site is not the best result. To enforce how much Google would like you to speed up the web they added the ’site performance’ tool in Google Webmaster Tools. Going to labs > site performance will show you how well your site is performing. (see image below)

If you notice that your site is particular slow speak to your webmaster who should be able to optimise things to make them a little faster

Sites that link to you
An extremely important factor in SEO is the sites that link to you. A link to your site is like a vote of confidence in your service, so the more links from respected sources you can receive the better. You should regularly check your links using the ‘links to your site’ section under ‘your site on the web’.
You should check a selection of your links to ensure they are of a high quality, you may also find some hidden gems here, like a strong link from a site with high PR. You can then contact that webmaster to change the link to one of your keywords to improve your rankings on that term.