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For me this is not about how you want your structure and not trying to change a structure to meet your analytics needs. Analytics can be set to handle any structure you choose, even if it can take some tweeking of the installation of the script, but In my experience, you allways have to do a custom installation of Analytics to get what you want anyhow.

So the question should rather be, should you have category paths in your urls or not and that is a much tougher questions.

First, we need to understand that the shorter URLs you can have, but still have good "readability" for the user, the better it is, but you still want to have a good structure for inbound linking.

I think, to make this fairly complex issue more simple I would say, that if you run content at your category pages, with the possibility to shop products and display of campaign information, then you really need to have the category in your URL.

This is because you want the user to be able to just delete the product in the url after finding it in Google to get to the category of that product. For inbound linking its also nice to have a clear and nice category in the URL.

On the other hand, if you dont have content on your category pages, then I woulnd't display them in the URL, mostly for the same, but oppositie, reason as above and as you get shorter URLs

You should not add parameters to your URLs if you dont need them.

If you still go ahead with parameters, just make sure you add link-cannonical to point on the none parameter url, to prevent duplicate urls of the same products

It looks to me like you have done it perfectly

I did a test without www.* and cannonical pointed to the www version, just as it should.

Haven't checked all your pages, but the 20 random I checked was all OK

I think most is covered in the above answers, but will add my thoughts on this element.

Yes, you should have "unique" and good content in your meta-descriptions, as well as in any content element. There is no short cuts for good SEO. Meta-description is not a ranking element by it self, but its a big factor for SERP CTR and driving business.

With that said, I don't think there is no need not to be as smart as possible and here is when CMS with auto-generation rules comes into play.

I recommend any site to use preamble as a content element as it will be a short descriptive keyword rich text that is selling and should get the user to quickly understand the content on the page and get them to move down the page or into a conversion funnel. For me this is exactly the same as the function of a meta-description.

We allways set up our clients CMS's to autogenerate meta-description from the preamble text, as this saves times. But, we also creates an override rule with a field for meta-description that we code that if meta-description contains content, then it overrides the preamble (as a meta-description).

That way you get the best of both worlds. The possibility to write good "on-page" SEO as well as saving time.

Good spotted on the syntax, I actually never looked at that (blush)

But as he has the www version within his cannonical on the none www version, there is no need to redirect the none www pages as you state, as the cannonical is just that.

I have had a long discussion with a client and their external SEO partner about their current footer. They have added all their product categories, both main and sub, to the footer.

From a pure SEO perspective is it still advisable, after all the pandas and penguines, to stay away from keyword important site wide footer linking to internal pages?

As the links will become a repeatable element and also containing the most important keywords, isn't the links actually hurting more than helping?

With 5000 index pages, it will risk "marking" the most important keywords as repeatable, lowering ranking, instead of increasing as their external part say.