Once you've optimized the list of keywords in your search engine marketing campaign, tweaked the bids and crafted stellar ad text to bring visitors to your site, landing page design is critical to converting those visitors into sales or leads. Here are a few of the best posts about SEM landing page design from last year. Good and bad landing page examples by CDF Networks Chad Frederiksen gets right to the point with this brief but helpful post on what separates bad landing page design (e.g., clutter) from good (a clear call to action among other attributes). MORE >>

Signs that you need a break from SEO. Poking fun at Web 2.0 naming conventions. Copywriting mistakes to avoid—and tips for writing better copy from a standup comedian. How not to use PowerPoint. Search engine rap (oxymoronic, but true). Clueless tech support. What do these have in common? They're all here in this collection of amusing, creative and strange posts from the last year. Stupid marketing copy mistakes by iMedia Connection Christopher Richards provides an amusing tour of common mistakes made when ad copy strays, under categories such as "sloppy copy" and "beyond clich é." tags: Web 2.0 MORE >>

Which social media sites are most helpful for SEO? What common mistakes should you avoid when optimizing a site for search? Which factors do search engine algorithms weight most heavily in determining search position? How can you generate more clicks even when your site isn't in one of the top three spots in search results? Get the answers to all of these questions and others here in the final(!) set of the best posts of last year on search engine optimization. Among his findings: organic search is the source of both the highest volume and best quality of traffic. Social traffic (e.g. MORE >>

million ), but Claire Cain Miller does an excellent job of outlining how Dell has generated, and continues to generate, significant sales through Twitter. She also notes that "Twitter made exactly $0 from those Dell sales, something that will very likely change." What are the four stages of Twitter enlightenment? How important is Twitter for business? How can you get more retweets and efficiently manage unfollowers? How exactly did Dell generate so much revenue by Twittering? What are the "secrets" of top corporate Twitterers? What’s a Retweet? Social Tagging MORE >>

If you feel compelled to put something there, make it as spammy and sales-y as possible. Yet with only 3 tweets (all of which were sales pitches with a link back to the account owner's spammy website), this person has almost 50,000 followers! But that won't help you sell your garbage, so a second, better approach is to tweet the same spammy sales message over and over. final tweet strategy is to mix slight variations of your pushy sales message with banal, tired and trite quotes from people like Zig Ziglar and Albert Einstein. They aren't celebrities. ROTFL!!" MORE >>