[Tucker]

How can a webmaster test how well their site is SEOed, ignoring link popularity. It seems hard to know what's good and what isn't, unless you make it to the top of the search engines, but a newer site might have great Search Engine Optimization but still not be high. How could the owner verify the SEO?

[worldseochamp]

create several new domains and or blogs for uncommon search phrase IE something with about 1000 results then give about the same power of backlinks to the domains wait a few weeks for sites postions to stablelize and make changes to the pages and see if it helps. If site moves up you figured something out old Search Engine Optimization contest sites are great for this.

[Ramage]

You can always check if the rankings have increased.
Say it was:
Ranking #500 before
Ranking #378 after
It means that your hard work has paid-off :)

[st1905]

Or you can check your index status at major search engine like google yahoo and msn network.I always check my pages at them and submit sitelinks every 15-20 days.