Retail sites do better this year (23% don't do ANY SEO, compared to last years 36%) retail but not good enough.

Only 17 percent of Internet Retailer's top 100 sites are fully using search engine optimization and marketing, while 83 percent are not and so are missing profitable opportunities, according to a new study by Oneupweb titled "There's Still Money on the Table: Internet Retailer Study 2005."

Oneupweb studied each site's meta tags, site architecture, keywords, content and other tactics.

Among the top 100 sites, only 17 percent were well optimized, 25 percent moderately optimized, 35 percent nominally optimized, and 23 percent not optimized at all.

If you take a look at their classification it becomes obvious, that they are ONLY looking at on-page optimization factors… a poor decision IMHO...

• Well Optimized – Meta tags were unique and relevant to page content, alt tags were optimized, large amount of indexable content throughout site.
• Moderately Optimized – Unique meta tags, low to moderate amount of copy, minor site architecture problems.
• Nominally Optimized – Only homepage titles and meta tags optimized, little indexable content, keywords on homepage copied throughout site, site architecture problems.
• Not Optimized – No SEO evident at all; titles were functional – describing company name or page theme only.

Now I think this analysis is quite interesting, but shows only a piece of the cake… where are the link metrics?

their list of well-optimized sites include

Sears (IR #6)

Quixtar (IR #14)

TigerDirect (IR #32)

Buy.Com (IR #33)

Zappos (IR #45)

Blue Nile (IR #48)

Schwan’s (IR #54)

Abebooks (IR #58)

Sharper Image (IR #63)

Walgreens (IR #64)

Lowes (IR #67)

Crutchfield (IR #70)

1-800-Contacts (IR #72)

PalmOne (IR #77)

SmartBargains (IR #78)

Drs. Foster & Smith (IR #80)

Alibris (IR #90)

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