Content is the foundation of SEO.

The purpose of an SEO campaign is to drive visitors to your website. But why do you want to do that? So they can see your content, of course.

• Without content, you don’t have a website.
• With lousy content (visually poor, grammatical errors, keyword stuffing, lack of organization) you have a website that chases people  away.
• With ineffective content you have a website that fails to convert visitors into paying customers.
• With effective content your website becomes a powerful sales tool.

But that’s not the only kind of content that’s important. You may not have realized it, but you have off-site content, too. That’s content in other places that helps promote your brand and direct potential customers to your website. What kind of content is that specifically? How about this:

• Articles and white papers posted on other sites.
• Online press releases.
• An email newsletter. (Sign up for ours!)
• Blog posts you write that are syndicated at one or more other blogs.
• Twitter mentions.
• Mentions at other social media like Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, MerchantCircle, LinkedIn and others.
• Mentions and links from other websites related to yours.

Is your content good enough for effective SEO?

How good is the copy on your site? You have to start there because everything else drives people to your on-site copy. Is it unique? Does it provide value by providing non-obvious information and answering questions? Is it interesting to read? Is it literate? Does it funnel visitors toward a buying decision? If not, have you considered hiring a professional copywriter?

Do you have the necessary off-site copy? This is one of the most forgotten factors in SEO. You need a strong presence in as many off-site places as possible to build your link popularity and to drive more visitors to your website.

Once you’ve considered all that, you may decide you need professional help with your SEO. If so, talk to us.

The Good News

Google started to improve it’s ability to index Flash content a couple of years ago. Now it can see content within Flash files so it can index that content. And it can follow links within Flash content as well. So Google can now tell what lies within an all-flash website.

The Bad News

This will still not allow all-Flash websites to compete well with HTML web pages. Why? For one thing, Flash is too slow loading, especially for smart phones, tablets and dial-up users. This is especially disadvantageous considering Google’s emphasis on page download speed as an important ranking factor.

With a Flash website there’s still  a lack of unique URLs which means no one can link to an internal page in an all-Flash site. Instead everyone has to go through your home page and follow any necessary navigation to get to the content they’re interested in. That conflicts with Google’s current emphasis on user experience as a ranking factor. You also lose many rankings factors associated with individual page titles, link anchor text, site maps and more.

So, What to Do?

• Use Flash, but only as individual flash elements on your pages.
• Don’t embed navigation to other flash content within your Flash content.
• Construct your site with individual HTML pages.
• Be sure to take advantage of all the HTML ranking factors available to your HTML pages.

Have questions? Need professional advice? Ask us about Flash and your website’s SEO.

Copywriting is a big deal on the web.

The words on your web pages and blog posts are very powerful. They convince people to buy from you. And they convince search engines that your material is worthy to display prominently in search results.

Bad writing compromises all of that “convincing”. Bad writing is very un-convincing. In fact, bad writing is likely to convince people of the wrong things: that you’re not fully literate, that you don’t pay attention to detail, that you’re not very smart, or that you’re not very professional.

So good writing is critical: proper spelling and grammar, effective focus and purpose, good organization in your copy.

But good writing, while essential, isn’t sufficient. You need effective writing.

What’s the difference?

Effective writing grabs the reader’s attention and holds it. Effective writing addresses the reader’s concerns and fears about doing business with you. Effective writing walks the reader right up to the point of sale.

Many of us can (often with a great deal of effort) churn out some good, coherent writing. But making that writing effective so it contributes to your bottom line is a skill of a whole different level. If you’re not sure you’re up to the challenge  — or if you’re quite certain you’re not up to the challenge  — you need a professional copywriter.

If that’s the case, you could do worse than starting with our list of strategic partners.

Katie Mack wrote about the importance of the user experience in SEO. We couldn’t have said it better:

We firmly believe that the best way to optimize your site for search engines is to optimize it for people. … People will stay longer on your site if they find content engaging and easy to navigate. You also want to encourage users to share your web content, which will naturally drive more traffic to your site from other sources.

She cites a few criteria for an effective user experience. You need content that:

• is easy to find
• has educational value
• is easy to read and understand
• invites contribution and sharing

This is especially important for websites that have lost rankings due to Google’s Panda Update earlier this year. That algorithm change gave preference to sites that provide original, relevant content that’s easy to digest and easy to share.

Google wants to highlight high quality websites and the Panda update was largely focused on that goal. Consequently, Google posted (shortly after releasing the Panda update) guidelines on what they think constitutes a high-quality website. They start out by saying:

Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals

We recommend their article.

What’s a bounce rate?

It’s the percentage of visitors to your site that bounce. What’s a bounce? It’s a very simple but important concept. When someone arrives at your website, takes one look and leaves without visiting any other pages — that’s a bounce. At a recent symposium, one presenter summed it up like this: “They came, they puked, they left.”

If lots of visitors on your web site bounce away, you’re losing them as customers. Clearly, lots of bounces are visitors who weren’t really looking for you, but for something else. When they bounce, they don’t represent lost sales. But when a real prospective customer bounces, they’re going to do business with one of your competitors. And that’s never good.

How do I tell my bounce rate?

Many hosting companies provide site analytics that display your bounce rate. Failing that, install the free Google Analytics on your site, and you can track the progress of your bounce rate over time very easily.

What’s a good bounce rate?

That may depend on your business. Retail websites typically experience about a 20-40% bounce rate. Well optimized content websites normally have a bounce rate in the 40-60% range. If your bounce rate is over 60%, you should be concerned. If it’s over 80%, you have a major problem.

How do I improve my bounce rate?

First, make sure your bounce rates aren’t because people are finding you by searching for stuff you’re not optimized for. If they find you by accident when they’re really looking for something else, those bounces are fine. But if people find you by searching important keywords, those are the bounces you want to improve.

Make sure it’s immediately obvious when someone lands on one of your pages by searching a relevant keyword phrase that the page makes it immediately clear that they’re in the right place. You have no more than 8 seconds to convince them your page is really all about what they searched for. Check your main above-the-fold headline and any other above-the-fold sub-headings.

Then make sure your web page isn’t turning them off. Check the copywriting and make sure you have appealing content. Dierdre Rienzo wrote in the MarketItWrite blog about common writing mistakes that contribute to a high bounce rate and which you need to avoid.

Make those changes and watch your bounce rate. If it doesn’t improve, look for other ways to keep people engaged on your site. Link to related content, use call to action links, and give your visitors what they’re looking for.

Susana Fonticoba, owner of Home & Office Computer Training, recently wrote an article about how to keep your reader’s attention when you have a long-ish document. She was referring to text documents, but her advice applies equally to web pages.

You know you just love to read a really long document – pages and pages of similar looking text —  your eyes get tired after the first few paragraphs. And what do you say at this point? I’ll just read the rest later. But you never do because it’s a hideously boring looking document.

You don’t want people doing that to YOUR documents. Wake them up by breaking it up.

Use paragraph headings – that way people can jump to the section they need. That’s where Styles come into play. Use the Heading styles to break up pages of text into smaller blocks of text they can find and read easily.

Paper documents and web pages share the same issues

It’s true: the same thing applies to your web pages, maybe even more so. Reading on the screen is more tiring to the eyes than reading something on paper.And people seem to have a shorter attention span when they’re surfing the web than they do when reading a paper document. And anyone who leaves your website because they found the content a little intimidating is a lost customer.

So pay special attention to white space. Using headings and sub-headings as Susana suggests not only breaks up the monotony of body text, but it also adds some white space around your content.

Turn lengthy lists from paragraphs into bullet lists. That another way to add some white space and make your copy look a bit more approachable. Add emphasis via italics or bold where appropriate to break up the monotony. (Just don’t use underlines on the web unless what’s underlined is a link.)

Use graphics. A nice image or two, whether photos or line drawings, with text wrapping around it goes a long way toward encouraging visitors to stick around and read more of your copy.

Good SEO can drive lots of potential customers to your website, but it takes a good user experience on your website to convert them into actual customers.

Don’t ignore the user experience on your web pages.

• Levi’s saw a 40 times increase in referral traffic from Facebook after implementing the Like button in April 2010 and has maintained those levels since.
• Outdoor sporting goods retailer Giantnerd.com saw a 100% increase revenue from Facebook within two weeks of adding the Like button.
• American Eagle added the Like button next to every product on their site and found Facebook referred visitors spent an average of 57% more money than non-Facebook referred visitors

These stories are chronicled in an article at Search Engine Land that also suggests that if you have a Facebook Like button on your site or your blog, it will get three to five times more clicks if:

• Versions that show thumbnails of friends are used.
• They allow people to add comments.
• If they appear at both the top and bottom of articles.
• If they appear near visual content like videos or graphics.

As long as we’re talking about the Facebook Like button, why not click on the Like button at the top of this post? (And thanks!)

In a recent online poll of SEO experts asking what’s the biggest mistake small businesses make in terms of their SEO, Joost deValk contributed an important one. Joost is an expert in the field of SEO, online marketing and web development, helping both big brands such as eBay as well as small businesses with their online strategy. He blogs at yoast.com, where he also provides the WordPress community with lots of free plugins to help them in their optimization.

His response to what he thinks is the worst mistake small businesses make was this:

To spend a lot of money (relatively speaking) on their website and even on SEM and SEO, but not on their site’s copy. I’m not a good copy writer myself, but the impact good copy can make on your business and on your rankings is often misunderstood.

When I made that investment myself on yoast.com, the results were immediate: higher rankings and, more importantly, I doubled conversions.

Don’t short-change the value of professional copywriting on your web site. It’s almost always a short-sighted mistake to think you can do as good a job as a professional copywriter. If you’d like to talk with a copywriter, you could do worse than starting out with our list of strategic partners.

There are a few principles that generate positive feelings in the visitors to your web site — positive feelings that are essential to converting those visitors into paying customers. Renee Shupe, the Redhead Virtual Assistant wrote a really helpful article on the subject: 5 Keys to Creating Websites That Sell.

Here they are in brief:

1. Make your web site interactive – give visitors a way to communicate with you.
2. Provide value — personally, I think this should be #1.
3. Provide easy, intuitive navigation
4. Have an attractive, professional-looking design
5. Give them a soft sell.

Renee expands on these nicely, so rather than try to explain all of them here. let us just refer you to her original article. It’s worth the read.

It’s an ancient problem. As business owners, we focus on the features we offer our customers: what do we offer them. Years of experience … proprietary techniques … specialized equipment … highly trained staff … industry certifications. That’s understandable: it’s what we have to do and offer to be professional in our business.

The problem is that’s not what our customers are looking for … or care about. They care about benefits. What can we do for them? And what sets us apart from everyone else who shows up in their search engine results?

If our web site focuses only on the features we offer, it not only will bore our potential customers, but it’s unlikely to get us high search engine rankings. Let’s face it, if you need a brake repair, are you going to search for “ASE certified technician” or “brake job”? The former is a feature, but the later is a benefit.

Noted copywriter Mistina Picciano of Market It Write writes about this problem in a recent blog post. We recommend it.