Every business wants its search engine rankings to be improved, and one way to do that is the use of email newsletters, an industry expert has claimed.

Denise Cox, a newsletter specialist writing on netimperative, cites a study of 4,000 people by Stanford University in which 90 per cent of the participants listed email as their number one online activity, with searching at number two.

She notes that while companies spend lots of money on SEO web design, few offer visitors anything they can sign up to which would create a continued dialogue.

Email newsletters can be used for this purpose, and she cites the usability guru Jakob Nielsen who said that they are "probably the single-highest return on investment action you can take to improve your internet presence".

"They are the primary way to liberate your site from dependence on search engines," Ms Cox added

After all this praise, she then gives three main tips: include all email newsletters online, put keywords in the title, meta tags, email headline and body copy and finally make sure the subscribe box is easy to find.

But should businesses spend a lot of time on email newsletters or should they focus first on search engine optimisation for their website?

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