On seomoz.org today there's an interesting article that looks at the SEO failings of major UK highstreet retails such as Boots and Waterstones.
The first thing they comment on is the application of keyphrase targeting. The point they make about this is that Boots don't include their company name in their title, so for example a page on make-up is just titled "Make-up" which does nothing to raise the search position of searching for the Boots brand (hence their low SERP). On the opposite side of the scale, they use Waterstones as an example of where they've used their company name in the title, but then have the same title on every page. The ideal balanced solution is to have both the company name, and something about the page you're on in the title.
The next point is that a redirect to a messy URL via anything other than a 301 is bad, very bad, as in don't do it. An example of this is Halfords.com - it doesn't help Google much. Another example of what ranks better in terms of URLs is that a URL like http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/category/49/Washing-Machines ranks better than http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/store/cur_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0738042494.1222078553@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccekadefejmhgddcflgceggdhhmdgmi.0&page=ProductList&category_oid=-30549&fm=4&sm=0&tm=0&show_all=true - even though Curry's pay for Pay-Per-Clicks for that search term they appear further down that a site that does not pay, but has a nicer looking URL.
As this shows, developers and designers should be more careful when deciding what titles to use on their pages, and how to structure their URLs.
