Unlike paid search, for which the cost of keywords is rising and the ROl getting harder to find, search engine optimization remains a cost effective method for generating sales and site traffic, and build­ing brand awareness.

“Merchants are missing the boat on maximizing natural search,” says Brian Klais, vice president of search for Netconcepts, a Madison, Wis.-based search engine and web site optimization firm. Natural search ought to be treated as an ad channel rather than a marketing effort that is driven more by the IT department because of the need for constant page man­agement to make them visible to search engine spiders.”By treating search engine optimization as an ad chan­nel, as opposed to a time and labor intensive process of optimizing page content, retailers can effectively broaden the reach of their catalog to shoppers at a much lower cost than buying keywords for paid search ads. Optimization allows retailers to market more product lines by generating additional category and subcategory landing pages that search spiders can crawl, so those products convert at a cost lower than paid search.

One of the most overlooked opportunities with search engine optimization is long tail search, in which a search starts on general terms. such as books, dresses. motorcycle gear. and then moves to more specific interests. Such as women’s Harley Davidson motorcycle clothing. With the long tail, the goal for retailers is to tap beyond the head of very popular search terms to the long tail that follows behind. Long tail searches not only collectively generate sizable traffic, which according to studies conducted by YourAmigo can generate 75% of organic search traffic, but traffic that typically converts better than more generic search terms. “Different shoppers use many different words to express the same thing, but many retailers do not look to optimize their search dictionary and instead focus on broader. more generic terms,” says Coupe. “But retailers can’t Just focus on the 20-30 most commonly searched keywords.. When all the different phrases and ways people search” using the long tail are added up. its a very fertile opportunity.”

The opportunity lies in optimizing the content on category and product pages within the web site so it is highly visible to search engine spiders, and in turn gener­ates a high ranking for long tail search strings, which tend not to be brand specific. Research by Netconcepts reveals that for every 40 searches on generic key­~words such as “bedding,” one will be conducted for “Wamsutta sheets.”

“Merchants can tap a market value of 40 to 1 by opti­mizing the long tail,” says NetConcepts’s Klais. Retailers get a lot of traffic from long tail natural search around brand names, but most do not capitalize as much as they can on this opportunity because they tend not to look at management of the long tail as an ongoing process.”

Indeed, the management aspects of search engine optimization prompt many retailers to focus more attention on paid search because they can get an immediate bang for their buck on paid search ads that transport shoppers to a product or category page. Search engine optimization, by contrast, often cannot bring shoppers to a specific page and, because they depend on search engine spiders to crawl them and then the engines to index them, take longer to show up in search results.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to manage and attention to details Some retailers will tell themselves they get an immediate impact with paid search, so why not put more of their money behind paid.

Instead, retailers need to be thinking more about how to strike a balance between SEO and paid search.

Part of taking a holistic view toward search engine optimization is examining the length of page URLs. If the page URL is too long, it is less likely to permit search engine spiders to deeply crawl the site and identify the pages and the content on them that will generate higher natural search rankings, such as blogs and customer reviews. Lengthy page URLs create more friction between the page and the search engines, reducing page visibility. Shortening page URLs increases visibility of the pages within the site to the search engine.

Sometimes liberating the content within a site requires creation of a subcategory page dedicated to the desired information.

On an apparel retailers site, high traffic and sales would come from a page optimized for the search term “black skirts”. The web site only had a general category page for skirts, which would never rank highly in the search eng ine results for the search term “black skirts.” They added a highly optimized black skirts subcategoy page which boosted traffic and sales.

Subcategory pages feature products in different ways around important keywords and allows traffic to come into the site through them. When it might otherwise not. A lot times you need to generate more subcategory pages to aid with search engine optimization than category pages.

Evaluating page design is another opportunity many retailers miss to improve search engine optimization results. While Ajax, (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) and Flash are becoming mandatory in site design can hinder page visibility to the search engines. Ajax is used to create more interactive site applications and Flash enables fast video downloads.

Retailers need to be careful of embedding their page content with Ajax because search engines can’t crawl the content contained within Ajax particular well, If retailers don’t watch out for this. They can inadvertently decimate their natural search rankings. This is something we talk to retailers about a lot,because there are serious ramifications for SEO if these applications are not properly used.