Here are some best practices to optimize your results from SEM campaigns: 1. Determine your budget: while there is no hard-and-fast rule for this, there are a number of factors that will affect the size of the budget required to optimize your return from search marketing: Number of keywords—more keywords means a higher budget. Time-of-day and days-of-week display—running a campaign 24/7 will require a higher budget than a business-hours-only campaign. Geographic display—a global campaign needs a higher budget than one limited to one or a few countries. Digg this! MORE >>

Landing pages are a critical tool for meeting your ever-increasing lead generation goals. Actually, only 8% of marketers reported that dedicated landing pages were ineffective , according to MarketingSherpa's 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report. I'm not sure what those 8% are doing, but the effectiveness of landing pages for the other 92% of marketers hinges on one component that isn't often discussed -- visitors have to trust you enough to give away their personal information on your landing page forms to obtain your offers. MORE >>

Landing pages are an extremely critical component of lead generation in inbound marketing. Are your landing pages optimized to their best visitor-to-lead conversion potential? If there's any question in your mind about whether your landing pages are up to snuff, take a look at following cheat sheet. Does the anatomy of your landing pages include all of the following crucial elements? If not, it might be time to conduct a few landing page makeovers. The Anatomy of an Effective Landing Page. MORE >>

Find out how to make landing pages work harder and increase conversion rates. Learn which attributes to double-check before launching a new site, mortal web design sins to avoid, and how to create a custom 404 error page. Yes, you’ll see all of this and more here in the best website and landing page design tips and techniques of the last year. Thesis Tutorial – Customizing the 404 Page by SugarRae. 149 Mortal Sins That Will Send Your Site to Web Design Hell by Web Pages That Suck. 10 Great B-to-B Sites by BtoB Magazine. Karen J. Digg this! MORE >>

Your landing pages are critical to your effectiveness as an inbound marketer. After all, what better way to collect inbound leads than landing pages? So if you're not putting the effort into creating landing pages -- and the offers to house on those landing pages -- your inbound marketing efforts might not be faring as well as they could be. And where there are landing pages, there is data. Interested in how your landing page analytics can help you make better marketing decisions? Or at least, there should be. MORE >>