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.