SEOfrancois

Sometimes I wonder why I ever chose the "seofrancois" nickname... Oh right, those guys at a conference kept pressing me for a twitter handle! But still, SEO is just a little part of what I'm interested in as far as making money, ahem, I mean as far as Internet Marketing is concerned.

I believe everyone doing SEO should keep in mind that SEO alone is useless. Optimizing a site for search engines doesn't do much, unless you're doing an SEO contest, maybe... but I'd still argue that doing an SEO contest doesn't do anything useful either.

If you're doing SEO, ask yourself: what's the point? More specifically: what happens next? People find your site in web engines. Some click through. Now what?

Below are some additional topics you may want to think about. (No, I'm not talking about PPC!) And what's more: contrary to SEO, those topics still have a lot of margin for improvement in many verticals, even the juicy ones:

• Copy writing
• Landing page optimization
• Navigation optimization & site usability
• Branding
• Customer loyalty
• Customer experience
• Trust factors
• User engagement
• Community building (onsite)
• Facebook & co.
• Mailing list buildings
• Email deliverability
• Mobile browsing

Email deliverability, for example, can be quite an interesting topic for SEOs; there is definitely a parallel to be drawn between how many factors influence your position in search engines and how many factors influence whether or not your email is going to be delivered to the recipients' inboxes, spam boxes or not delivered at all... (You guys should do email deliverability contests to Hotmail for a change! :p )

But beyond that, the list above contains areas which are less technical but require more creativity instead. I believe these are the areas where you will find the most growth in 2012.