I would want an effective landing page, far more than I would want a great SEO strategy. Why?
1. Its a quicker process (15 to 30 days vs. 9+ months)
2. Its a bigger multiplier (if you’re getting a conversion rate of 1% now and you move that to 15 to 20%–thats HUGE).
3. Landing pages can be used in sales campaigns too, whereas search optimization only has value on the web.
4. The feedback loop for landing page optimization is better than for SEO.
5. SEO is still a black box, despite all the help from SEO Moz and various Software as Service providers in the SEO space.
6. SEO is competing with gray & black hat tactics–landing page optimization does not.
7. Google can shift its algorithm over night. Human psychology changes–but not that dramatically.
8. Landing page optimization can help copy in external communication campaigns.

Basically landing page optimization is science and can be A/B tested–SEO isn’t–it would be low on my priority list–except for getting coverage with large blogs.

I think e-commerce is the only web business which requires more SEO driven strategies. Even then, the large lift at the begining is likely to come from a combination of online one to one PR AND following SEO best practices.

Also, if you are a social strategist or online marketer this is how I would price my strategy services:

Gear your social media packages based on what you determine to be the clients goals.

1. Price by modules
2. Provide bronze, silver, & gold options
3. Provide packages which include training & those which include training & execution. Be specific about the ways you add value to framing their message, strategy, and saving them time.

You haven’t included anything about creating a landing page or an email campaign. Increasingly thats critical to creating a closed loop model of marketing for social media. Without getting user emails you are letting huge holes in your funnel leak. This is why Gary Vanerchuck is able to lob huge criticism at the social media community with some degree of truth.

As a caveat–I’m either going to do an external project OR re-brand here at Creative Fusion–given my understanding of this strategic orientation.

• A/B Testing helps make your marketing scientific
• Pay for performance-like model. This helps optimize ROI for marketing dollar.
• Quicker turn around timeframe 6 hours vs. 6 months with social media or paid search.
• Hyper targeting to your customer (web marketers call this the long tail of search marketing)

PPC Services We Offer

• Paid search management to optimize your click through rate & your ad spend
• Targeted keyword research
• Landing page copywriting & design
• Strategy set up for closed loop marketing
• Whitepaper & List bait creation

We do the work, you reap the profits. To find out more or to get started today call us 9am to 7pm at (615) 974-9662. We look forward to talking with you. We want to help you reach the customers you are missing every day and to optimize your spending for optimum return on investment.

• Call to action (including deals)
• Button size & copy
• Pricing
• Visuals
• Highlighting key words
• Guarantee
• Deals or Premiums
• Customer Testimonials
• Media Testimonials
• Remove clutter

You can see many more at Conversion Rate Optimizers mega-list of conversion optimization tips.
• Layout

SEO Moz
SEO Book
Market Motive

In addition, the membership site Mixergy is quite helpful–its focused on the entrepreneurship and business side, which is quite helpful. Third Tribe Marketing is another, but I haven’t used any of their content, so I’m not qualified to make an assessment of the quality of their social media and internet marketing training.

Sprint
Tellme
US Cellular
Verizon
Classifieds
LiveDeal

Navigation/GPS
Acura
ALK
Audi
BMW
Chrysler
DENSO
Ford
Garmin
GM
Honda
Infiniti
Jaguar
Jeep
JVC
Lexus
Lowrance/Navico
Nissan
Mio
Nextar
Onstar
Subaru
TeleAtlas
Telmap
Telenav
TomTom
Toyota
Pioneer
viaMichelin
Zenrin

So I suggest you to scale down these link building methods in favor of others:

* Forum posting and blog commenting. It has plenty of benefits, but don’t do that in hopes of increasing your PageRank.
* Social bookmarking. Same as above, share what you think is valuable. You can get some click-through traffic, but don’t expect any PageRank.
* Article submission. Don’t go for the numbers, submit to top directories to get traffic, syndication and recognition.
* Bulk directory submission. It’s probably not worth your time and money any more.
* Bulk link exchange. This is explicitly discouraged by Google now, and can get you banned from their search results.

I don’t mean you should stop doing all of the above. Remember about link diversity, both for SEO and traffic building reasons. Get some extra links if that’s easy, but focus on high quality links in your strategy. I believe any extra one-way links can’t hurt you, otherwise it would be too easy for competitors to bomb each other with bad links.

Now, some quality link building methods to scale up:

* Guest blogging. It’s the most reliable way to get a quality context link on a reputable, relevant blog.
* Link baiting. While it is hard to create a successful link bait, one success can pay for several failures.
* Press releases. With some effort and some luck, you can get a quality link from big media.
* Joint ventures. Get to know people and discuss how you can do business together. Be creative.
* Building communities. Create a resource that attracts a targeted community, and they will link to you.

As you may notice, the methods that bring the highest quality links are also the ones which are widely used by the bloggers, and which can benefit a lot from their already high social activity. So as a blogger, you should probably welcome the change, and hope that the Internet will become a better place for everyone, with less spam and clutter.

And listen to the advice from Google. Pay less attention to PageRank and more attention to your content, traffic and conversion rates.

While this is far from conclusive, its worth doing A/B testing using this as a hypothesis for future search engine optimization and link building efforts in 2011.

Paid Landing Page and Conversion Optimization Tools

Here is a demo for Visual Website Optimizer. ($49 to $249+ per month)

Here is a demo for Optimizely ($19 to $399+ per month):

Here is a demo of Unbounce. ($25 to $500+ per month)

You can also check out this Mashable article on A/B Testing which focuses on 7 players in the A/B testing marketplace (Optimizely, Performable, Unbounce Visual Website Optimizer and others).

For price and function, the 3 tools I’ve listed are probably the top tools available (and I believe they all have a free trial for 30 days). If you’re on a budget where the above are out of range, the Google Website Optimizer might be helpful.

Also both Kiss Insights & the Hello Bar allow for direct messaging to user.

What website conversion tools would you recommend?

What you want to know.

List of vertical search engines (or directories) for citations in local search.

To find additional citations in your specific niche, use the local search toolkit. You will find a video which explains the local search toolkit here.

1) Marchex Local Lead-I wasn’t able to find positive or negative reviews of Marchex online. They did receive the award for best technology for small and medium business in 2009 from Search Engine Watch (they also have a pay for call exchange). You can contact Marchex for information about their local lead program: 800.684.9294
2) Reach Local-unfortunately there are some negative reviews of Reach Local. It also did well in the Search Engine Watch award for small business technology.
3) Yodle-there seem to be an incredible amount of negative reviews of this service online. I think this is particularly the case with businesses which have $30 to $40 lead generation models versus $150 to $250 or more models. Although there are also issues with a) customer service b) overselling services c) questions of the black box of payment.
4) Web Visible is in this category local business marketing category. They have will create a pay per click campaign & landing page for you. They have a start up fee ($200 to 900 a month) and a monthly minimum of $700.
5) Adoozle-unfortunately I didn’t find any negative or positive reviews of Adoozle online. Their pricing plans seem reasonable as long as you get to keep your URL when you are done. Also, Adoozle is a part of Keymetric. (Although on the downside it seems odd that they only have email contacts listed on their website. I would almost rather speak to someone in India that knew what was up rather than wait up to 24 hours for an answer. Although, contacting Keymetric directly may be more helpfu: (866) 305-9110

Unfortunately it appears you should try the service you are most comfortable with and experiment to see how they serve the needs of your business. Obviously you should inquire about their experience getting the cost AND quality of leads you are looking for. You might also check to see how long their customers usually stay with them, as a way to evaluate the value and overall customer experience. (What percentage stay longer than 3 months? What percentage stay longer than 6 months?)

Directory Listing & Monitoring Services

1) Universal Business Listing ( UBL.org )-USB is a local directory listing service. They have packages from $30 to $49 per year on the low end.
2) Get Listed-get listed is a local listing monitoring service

There are also a host of players in the b2b lead generation space, which could obviously be helpful for small and medium b2b companies (Ingenio Marketing, Five9, KPI Analytics Inc, etc etc).

Hopefully this can help you make your decision with regard to local small and medium business lead generation. If you have any extra to add on this topic feel free to leave your comment or review. Thanks for reading.

1) Great content: What does that mean?
-ideally original (original angle or original design/look)
-engaging to readers
-engaging to other bloggers in the space or in related spaces
-visually compelling (or otherwise multimedia)
-written in conversational language
-authentic as possible
-embedded in a story
2) Keyword rich (this isn’t keyword stuffing, its more about latent semantic indexing or related terms).
But keyword rich material can only get you so far.
3) Engage experts, rockstars, and influencers.

4) Social proof (to help conversion optimization)

5) High usability (to help conversion opitimization)

6) Tied to offline activities & other online marketing activities.

7) Sharable.

8) Findable
Put your best content available to all users as much as possible.

1) Woot
2) Ideeli-exclusive and (aka by invite only) and for upscale fashion
3) Shnoop.com-looks to be discount consumer products (primarily brands)

Shnoop.com is a daily deal website, that offers a deeply discounted product everyday but gives you a second chance a 2nd day on “yesterday’s shnoop”. Everyday a new deal is introduced.

4) 1saleaday
5) Stuffbuff
6) New Deal a Day
7) Facebooks’ Buy with Friends
8] Google Offer (Google’s new so-called Groupon Killer)
9) Deal Pulp
10) Daily Steals-a little cheezy IMHO
11) On a Day Buys

Other Social Buying and Discount Websites
1) Groupon
2) Living Social
3) The Deal Map
4) Offer Mint (unavailable)
5) Cheap Today (focuses on Sears, Kmart, Target, Kohl’s, Calvin Klein, and Walmart. )
6) Deal On (Saavy Circle)
7) Offer Matic
8] At Cost-city by city
9) Groupful (not available)
10) Appsumo-is internet application and sofware deals.
11) Brads Deals

(source for info)

In addition there are a range of coupone sites like Love a Coupon, Coupon Tweet, Coupon Graavy, Coupon Printster. For further info on discounts and coupons you can find info at Deals.Alltop. You may also like this list of Woot Clones.