I must admit one of my favorite parts of the Super Bowl are the commercials. Maybe it’s the business in me or a little of the marketing in me. Or maybe it’s the anticipation of being shocked or surprised.  As I sat and watched the Super Bowl commercials, I laughed at some, I was bored with others, and even smiled at the countless beer commercials.  Out of all the commercials, there was one that stood out and made me actually take notice.  It made say out loud, “that was brilliant”.  It wasn’t a commercial that was funny, it wasn’t controversial, it wasn’t even all that entertaining.  It didn’t even have any actors or speaking.  What it was, though, was simple, direct and showed you exactly what they can do for you.

The best Super Bowl commercial in my book was the Google commercial.  It was brilliant.  But again, maybe that’s the business in me or a little of the marketing in me speaking.

Is 2009 really coming to an end already? It’s hard to believe that the year has gone by so fast, especially with all that has happened here at Go Smart Solutions! We have been able to grow our member base, even throughout these tough economic times. And while we know this is due to the value and results that our services deliver, we know that it is also due to our loyal customers. We are so very thankful.

We are excited about 2010, as we have no plans of slowing down! We will be launching even more valuable services soon, but here’s a quick look at a few notable milestones from 2009:

• EmailFlyerAds has grown to 21,600 members. Over 17,000 email flyers have been sent totaling 45,307,716 real estate emails!
• ClassifiedFlyerAds now has 23,800 members who sent out 120,000 ads in 2009!
• RentShout was launched in June this year, and since then has grown to 1,300 members who have sent out over 1,500 ads!
• RealShout is our latest reveal, launching earlier this month. This service will use Geo-targeted technology and proven Go Smart marketing systems to deliver leads to real estate brokers, MLS’s, and mortgage brokers.
• TwitBacks was a fun side project that took on a life of its own in 2009. With more than 152,000 members and 166,700 Twitter backgrounds created, TwitBacks was a fun success!

We hope your year has been as great as ours, and wish everyone the very best for 2010!

Read our newsletter for a more in-depth look at 2009.

Photo credit: Optical Illusion

So you’ve done your smart organic keyword research and have your pay-per-click campaign in place. You’re starting to see an increase in search ranking and visits to your site, but how do you ensure that your visitors are converting? Another helpful session at PubCon revealed important tips to help your post-click conversions.

1. Deliver On Your Promise - Whether someone has landed on your page from a PPC campaign or an organic search, your title tags and PPC titles have given them an expectation of what to find when they click through. Make sure your landing page is targeted and relevant to that visitor.
2. Above The Fold – This term has been brought over from the print world when it referred to making sure that important messages and headlines appeared above the newspaper fold. This is also true with landing pages; your important messages and “call to action” should appear “above the fold”. A visitor shouldn’t have to scroll down the page to get what they’re looking for; most times they won’t.
3. No Flash Messages – If your landing page has important selling points that rotate, there’s a good chance your visitor will never see the message you want them to (they won’t wait). Use a static image or bold text headline to convey the message clearly and instantly.
4.  Simple is Better – This point echoes the first, but refers more to the layout and design of the page. If there is too much information (text, images, video, forms, etc.) on your page, visitors may become overwhelmed and click out. Instead, take advantage of whitespace on the page and have only the elements that are absolutely necessary to the visitor. For example, a landing page with one title, one image, one paragraph, and one form (or other “call to action”) will convert much better than the “information overload” page.
5. Test, Test, Test – This is something the landing page experts could not stress enough. Every business is different and has customers with different preferences on how and when to take action. To truly make landing pages the most effective they can be, you must continually test them against other versions.

While these tips are not absolute truths for every business and every industry, they are a starting point for creating landing pages with great post-click conversions. With continual testing (research “A/B Testing” and “Multivariate Testing” for landing pages), you’ll be on your way to carving out landing pages that convert.

What’s better than free, targeted traffic to your website? If you’re a site or business owner, not much. While the sessions at PubCon offer up everything from general to painfully detailed advice on organic search, here are the “ABC’s” of search from presenter Carolyn Shelby:

1. Analytics
   - Don’t rely solely on keywords that are already driving traffic; seek out other possibilities for new insights.
   - Go through your 404′s (people that have incorrectly typed domains in a search bar) to see what people are looking for (but not finding) on your site. This will shed light on what the user expectation is when they visit your website.
2. Ask
   - Don’t assume that real people understand industry jargon and buzzwords. You understand it; they may not.
   - Ask non-industry people about your product or service. Take note of the terms and phrases they use to describe things and incorporate those into your keyword lists.
3. Brainstorm
   - Invite people from throughout your organization to brainstorm on how they would search on the internet for your product or service. Their fresh perspective may reveal valuable insights.
4. Crunch your numbers, Cull your lists, and Create your keyword lists.
   - Once your research has yielded workable lists, it is imperative to evaluate which keywords and phrases are yielding the desired conversions.
   - Pull keywords that are not productive and focus on ones that are.
   - After honing in on the keywords and phrases that work best for your site, you should be able to build and nurture very effective keyword lists.

By no means do these “ABC’s” cover all that is important with SEO. They do, however, bring to light methods that oftentimes don’t immediately come to mind.

With today’s announcement of the Google-Twitter search deal and the Bing- Twitter search deal, it is more evident than ever that Twitter should be an important part of your SEO strategy.  Why?

Well, if Twitter results are going to appear in Google and Bing search results, don’t you think it’s a good idea you get your important information on Twitter?  Google is going to pull in what people have tweeted on Twitter. For example, if you search for “online advertising” in Google, you may see some tweets in the Google search results that relate to this search, and possibly even some of this http://search.twitter.com/search?q=online+advertising integrated into the Google search results themselves.

It will be interesting to see how Google displays the tweets in their search results. Will they display them within their regular search or will it be a side option? I have concerns about spam issues. The spammers know how to hijack all the Twitter trending topics with their spam links. I hope Google has a good way to filter this stuff out.

So for all those who argued Twitter has no importance for SEO – think again.

Google+Twitter = important for SEO.
Bing+Twitter = important for SEO.

Welcome to “real time” search!