SEO, Email Marketing, and Web Usability But which one?

A recent survey by Shop.org indicates that online marketers have email marketing, search engine optimization, and web usability at the top of their agenda for the coming year. But which one is more important? E-mail is obviously the push strategy used by online marketers to push information out to their audience. Search engine optimization allows web marketers to pull people in rather than push information out. But push or pull will not matter to your business unless you are able to convert visitors that you are getting to your site. So, I would put Web Usability as the most important aspect of online marketing for 2007-08. Search engine optimization and e-mail marketing go hand in hand. In a sense, they complement each other, but I would give more priority to SEO as over 90% of Internet traffic is generated through search engines (Forrester 2006). Obviously this order could be different depending where your company is and what it wants to achieve, but the goal should be to have an integrated online marketing approach which focuses on all these aspects of online marketing and not just SEO. SEO is important but it is certainly not everything!