SEO is a longer term solution. Depending on who your list providor/service is set up you may end up paying monthly or each time you send a message. I look on them both as complimentary services. You SEO your site, get traffic, make sales and capture list signups. You get repeat business from email marketing to your list.
whohw, hard comparison, since these are 2 complete different things why choose between those?.. it's not that one would rule out the other right?
SEO is different from email marketing, with email marketing you can get visitors on your website "on-demand", and SEO it's a total approach on getting traffic. I strongly believe that email marketing is a different level of calling people to action than SEO. Vladimir
Email Marketing & SEO -both are different things. Email Marketing can be a part of your overall Search Engine Marketing. In Email Marketing it is possible that you are approaching people who doesn't need your products. In SEO you will get the actual people who wants perticular services and who are in need of perticular products, and who search for them on search engines and find you. More convertion ratio. SEO is a whole long process involving On page optimization(Title, Meta tags, interlinking, sitemap, keywords in url etc.) & Off page optimization(directory submission, link exchange, article submission, press release, blogging etc. ).