I paid a company in Canada to write a site map and do some other optimisation. Our site is about 7 months old and I am spending all my evenings trying to learn about the religion that is SEO!! What worries me now I have learnt what feels like a drop in the ocean, is that I think there may be fundimental flaws in the work, but as I'm a novice I could be WAY off the mark!! All advice is VERY gratefully reiceived! My site is www.thesaddleryshop.co.uk What worries me most is the title tags used, and I'm not sure about the description either! I just can't get Yahoo to look at me and wondered if these may be the problem. Thank you!
SEO sometimes can be more simple than complex. Just keeping your HTML clean, your content specific and consistent (rule of context: title, header 1, paragraph, footer) and you should be ok. Stay away from hidden links, or bloated meta and alt tags. they are pointless for sure.
Your homepage has <META NAME="Description" Content=""> you need to fix this ASAP as this is the description that people see when looking at your site in the search results. It probably won't help your rankings but it will attract visitors. Also try remove the session id from oscommerce and install a mod rewrite script to allow you to include some keywords in the urls. Make sure you redirect from the old url's to the new ones. You should also be creating text or xml sitemaps and submitting them to google and yahoo to make sure all your pages are indexed. Other than that try building more links. Submit guides, articles and product reviews to as many sites as possible. Yahoo is easier to manipulate and responds to links better than google and MSN I find.
I would agree with the comment about the description tag. When you are talking about SEO, you are really talking about whether or not you are appearing in the top few listings for the search terms you believe would use to come across you on the internet. For instance, "tack shop". You have this term in the meta title for your site. You may want it in the main title, as in "Welcome to The Saddlery Tack Shop!' That is supposed to help Google realize that you are a tack shop. There are only four adwords ads on google pages for the keywords "tack shop" that I got. You might be able to get this term for around a nickle a click and set a maximum AdWords spend budget of say US$50 per month. This is not supposed to help with Google SEO ranking, but my past experience suggests Google may not ignore this in assessing page rank. More importantly, you are on the top page of the search listings whether or not you rank there. Since you are trying to sell a service, people looking for you are looking to buy and you may find a little AdWords spending will go a long way to driving perytinent traffic to your site. The other important thing you can do to make an ecommece site more attractive to search engines and users is find a way to show some kind of original content on your entrance pages. In your case, I might suggest show and/or performance results from fairs and other venues, along with a dynamic coming events. Good luck.