By Shaun White, Demandware Retail Practice

As the acquisition of new customers through both traditional and interactive media becomes more costly and difficult, online retailers need to fully exploit all opportunities to drive more qualified traffic to their web sites. Search engine optimization (SEO) offers an effective way to broaden your market reach, increase your visibility around key product areas and attract more qualified shoppers—all for free.

SEO is a combination of strategy and tactics and art and science. It requires ongoing attention at multiple levels of an online retail business. It's often misunderstood and as a result, frequently under-utilized. But once you understand the fundamental elements that go into optimizing a site for organic search, it's not nearly so perplexing. And when it's managed and implemented correctly, it delivers constant results in return.

As a member of Demandware's Retail Practice team, my goal is to provide actionable recommendations based on best practice analysis and industry assessment. We are in the process of building a "best practices" engine to summarize a lot of what we know and periodically publish it in the form of a whitepaper. Here is my first piece—"Optimizing Your Online Retail Site for Organic Search". This paper highlights the untapped opportunity missed by organizations regarding organic search, the must do and don't do list of SEO, and 5 strategist considerations and organization must focus on regarding its SEO approach. The paper will also focus on the tactics and tools to use to analyze an organization's current site and then create an actionable plan.

By Julian Chu, Demandware Client Success

SEO is a hot topic these days. As the PPC channel gets more competitive and costs increase, more online retailers are focusing on SEO as a means of driving traffic to their sites. By increasing their rankings for high-value keywords, merchants can build a foundation for attracting new customers over time without having to pay for every click-through. What’s more, the investments that drive improved natural search traffic are usually good steps to take to improve the customer shopping experience in general.

But online merchants have plenty to worry about already, and it’s important to spend your time wisely.  So first, we’d like to share our “top 10” list of the most essential SEO tasks. If you do nothing else, periodically assess your site in the following areas and address any major gaps.

SEO “Must Do’s”

	1.	Create relevant, keyword-rich product and category  names, titles and descriptions.
	2.	Add relevant, keyword-rich content to the site.
	3.	Populate SEO-relevant attribute fields in your product catalog.
	4.	Ensure proper redirects from legacy URLs.
	5.	Configure 404 error pages.
	6.	Submit sitemaps to search engines and directories.
	7.	Analyze site for broken links.
	8.	Fix landing pages.
	9.	Add tags to images.
	10.	Keep abreast of major changes in the search engine market landscape.

Robust SEO functionality within the ecommerce platform can help retailers perform many of the above tasks efficiently, so their teams can focus on other valued-adding activities. For example, Demandware offers the following capabilities in this regard:

	•	Automatically generated “search-friendly URLs” for category, product detail and other content pages that reduce URL length and contain relevant keywords or other desired text.
	•	Built-in “search engine attributes” within the product catalog that are specifically designed for search engine consumption. These enable merchants to easily define and modify key tags such as title, description, keywords and the page URL (should you want to override the automatic settings).
	•	URL mapping rules that will automatically direct users from legacy URLs to the new URLs on Demandware. This functionality is critical when migrating your site from one platform to another. It will also help preserve your existing search engine rankings, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
	•	Automated generation of site maps that can be submitted to Google and other search engines.
	•	Automated reduction of “code bloat.” Search engines generally don’t like unnecessary content within web pages, but developers often insert comments to help improve manageability of the site. Demandware provides special tags that enable these comments to be removed at runtime.

True SEO excellence requires dedicated focus on competitive analysis, optimizing site content, and building external linking relationships. Thus, it’s important to choose an ecommerce platform that takes care of the SEO basics, so your team can devote their attention to things that will really differentiate your site and improve business results.