Stephan Spencer is president and founder of NetConcepts, a company providing SEO services, email, and site design. As a well-respected “white-hat” SEO guru, we were delighted Stephan took the time to share his insights with us on online marketing.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman: What are the biggest challenges & opportunities facing online retailers today in relation to natural search, Stephan?

Stephan Spencer: Because search is evolving so quickly (it seems like a day doesn’t go by when Google doesn’t make an announcement of a new service tool or update) online retailers have to continually look to the horizon, not just where they are today.

The strategies for optimizing for the tail are in some cases drastically different than those for optimizing for the head. For example, you couldn’t rely on keyword-rich text link ads in the same way when optimizing for the tail. So it is a challenge to think differently and it is a huge opportunity for those that do.

For retailers doing it right, what fraction of SEO traffic should come in on brand terms?? How much on non-brand terms? (Brand = retailer’s own brand name, not brand names of retailer’s manufacturers) And tell us more about the long tail of natural search.

It depends. For the average medium to large sized online retailer the opportunity is, according to our research, 38 times greater for non-branded terms than for branded terms. Therefore an online retailer who is doing it right should be getting a majority of their traffic from non-branded terms. That is predicated on a very important point: capturing the Long Tail of non-branded traffic is a function of what percentage of your site’s web pages are yielding search traffic.

Even for a retailer with a huge brand presence, you might think it makes sense that they get a majority of search traffic from brand terms, yet I assert they should still strive to maximize their non-branded search traffic. Remember, there is always room for improvement.

What’s your advice to retailers who need to improve their SEO traffic but face marketing and/or IT resource constraints?

If their IT resources are limited, I would suggest employing a proxy optimization approach, using a service such as our GravityStream, to optimize the content, HTML, internal linking structure, etc. Thus, the optimization work can be done easily through a web-based interface and not involve the IT team to implement.

If marketing resources are the limitation, I would suggest the retailer delegate the majority of the SEO work to their SEO agency, including copy optimization, keyword research, link building, HTML optimization, metrics analysis and so forth. If the retailer is running GravityStream or similar technology, then the optimized copy, title tags, anchor text, etc. can all be applied to the proxy first to build the business case for the changes, measure and prove the ROI, and further tweak and improve. In other words, the proxy can serve as a testbed for trialing out the optimizations, observing the effects and correlating the causes with the effects, on a page-by-page basis.

Social marketing — myspace, facebook, etc. What is the importance of such sites to online retailers?

I would say MySpace in particular is extremely important.

MySpace has been shown to drive more traffic to online retailers than MSN Search — uh, I mean Microsoft Live Search. It is even more important if you are selling to a younger set and you need to appear trendy and hip. I blogged some examples (here and here) of marketers who have successfully cracked MySpace, including Pugster.com and Apple. Included in those posts are some useful tips for online retailers.

What marketing blogs do you regularly follow?

Oh, gee! That could take a while to answer. I follow over 200. One of my favorites is Matt Cutts’ blog.

Favorite recent movie?

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Did you know there’s an iceberg the size of 25 football fields floating off the coast of New Zealand?

Last question: something personal…. do you prefer chocolate or vanilla icecream?

Chocolate, I guess.