1. 301 redirects to preserve search engine rankings 

    
2. Avoiding duplicate content and use of the canonical tag where relevant

    
3. Dynamically generate search engine friendly URLs for product and content pages e.g. www.yoursite.com/category-name/product-name instead of www.yoursite.com/productdetails.aspx?pid=037012&cid=144&language=en-GB

    
4. Ability to specify / edit URLs for individual pages via CMS – important for campaign landing pages and microsites

    
5. Support for linking of product pages and content pages to improve internal linking – should be delivered via the Catalogue Management tool or CMS

    
6. CSS absolute positioning for text links on product list pages to ensure the first link for each product is keyword rich

    
7. Dynamic XML sitemap that is submitted on a regular basis

    
8. HTML sitemap that is auto generated based on your catalogue and site structure

    
9. Support for rich snippets within platform – encoding of data in RDF format e.g. customer ratings & reviews

    
10. Custom 404 error page and automated report to flag error pages so your internal team can take action (you can achieve this through a separate monitoring tool such as Indiabook)

    
11. Robots.txt file is provided and you can access and edit when required

    
12. Core provision for meta content (title, description, keywords) that is auto generated when you load new products and content pages and can also be edited easily from within the CMS

    
13. Text links in navigation not images; if coders are using sIFR (flash replacements) push them for clarification on how this is being done to ensure it complies with accessibility standards

    
14. Keyword optimised H tags within html for headings – structure for use of H1 to H6 to provide a relevant hierarchy of content

    
15. Ensuring flash objects are search engine friendly

    
16. Ensuring pdf content is readable e.g. captions for images, document meta data

    
17. Graceful degradation – when elements like JavaScript are disabled in the browser, key content is still visible to search engine spiders/bots as well as to visitors

    
18. RSS feeds to support product and news announcements e.g. deal of the day

    
19. Page load time to meet agreed threshold but make sure you define how load speed is measured e.g. after all page elements have loaded – this factor will be included in Google’s algorithm in 2010

    
20. Social media content such as blogs are hosted on your primary website domain using an SEO friendly blog engine (e.g. Wordpress is better than Blogger) - blogs usually sit on a sub-domain such as blog.yoursite.com to ensure you benefit from the search engine juice.

econsultancy.com/uk/blog/5525-top-20-seo-requirements-for-any-ecommerce-platform