For the SEO/SEM Professionals out there, I have a very special announcement to make: We cannot lose sight of what our job description is! No matter the color of your hat, whether you choose to try and game Google or draw and build natural traffic, the goal is the increase of traffic. In order to increase traffic, our goal is to make a site more valuable to the end user – more engaging, more sticky, worth clicking on. Does that mean we raise the search engine rank so that the page is easier to find? Absolutely. Does that mean we also need to concentrate on our users? Heck yes. Yet, sometimes I think we forget the other moniker we all love to adopt on our LinkedIn pages: SEM. We all claim to be Search Engine Marketers, but when I speak to other professionals in my field, I am always surprised at how little we pay attention to this key aspect of our title, and what it implies. Marketing principles teach us to segment our customer base, understand what drives their “Black Box,” and tailor our approach to target them. On that thought, I’d like to take a moment to direct your attention to an SEO professional who I believe truly is a Marketer before an Optimizer: Hal Licino. 
In his recent post on SEJ: Shifting From SEO To SFO (Search Female Optimization) In Your Email Marketing, he calls us to concentrate on our clients more than Google. (Read The Full Article Here.) Classic marketing principles tell us that many of the moneymaking decisions made in the house are made by women, so please take a moment to read that article so that your SEO/SEM strategy can be tailored to target the decision makers. For those who didn’t click the link, here are, in my opinion, the most important points to take away:
1) Women from all demographic sectors prefer to share via email
2) Information has to be trusted by women in order to be shared
3) Email trumps social networking as the preferred way for women to share What does this mean for SEO? For extremely competitive landscapes, where your PPC bids are just a little too high for your clients liking, or the keywords you’d love to dominate are desired by all; Why not make high-quality, linkable content? Why not make your site a trustworthy source of information? Why not encourage your visitors to share through email AND social media sites? In my opinion, there’s no excuse or reason not to.