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.

Content mills — that may be a term you’re unfamiliar with. It refers to (usually off-shore) companies that generate keyword-rich “SEO copy” for web sites. Usually that copy is rife with grammatical errors, obviously overly stuffed with keywords, and often impossible to read and understand. It’s designed to get the keywords prominently in front of the search engines, with no regard for actual people who might try to read it to gain useful information.

Heather Lloyd-Martin of Success Works is an SEO copywriter, and she wrote this recently:

You’ve probably heard the buzz that Google was going to start treating content mill articles much differently. A post on the Official Google Blog states,”…We hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.

Can I get an “Amen?”

I’ve railed on content mills before – companies that focus more on quantity (paying writers low-dollar for keyword-stuffed SEO content) and how dangerous they are for the industry. Good for Google for taking action and (hopefully) pushing the “delete” button on these poor-experience pages. Hopefully, this means that the concept of content mills really is (almost) dead in Google’s eyes – and we can expect better quality results.

But that brings up another question: How do we help companies understand that, if they want good SEO content (you know, content that isn’t going to cause problems in Google and Bing,) that means paying for it.

You can read her full article on this here.

Bill Treloar, owner and principal SEO consultant at Rank Magic, will be joining two other experts at a free seminar and workshop on social media in New Jersey on Valentine’s Day.

Social media is now integrated into the fabric of our daily lives. We encounter it everywhere, in almost every part of our society and culture.  Everyone is talking about social media: Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and many more.

What many small business owners are just beginning to realize is that today’s social media can be leveraged to help their businesses attract and keep customers. The truth is that social media is a powerful new marketing force and as such the business that ignores it, does so at the risk of underachieving on the competitive landscape.

A free seminar/workshop to bring business owners up to speed is being held on Monday, February 14 from 9:00 am to 12:30 pm in Parsippany. The host is Set Focus at 4 Century Drive. Admission is free to all who confirm their intention to attend in advance.

Running the workshop will be a team of seasoned local professionals. Greg Stewart, founder of NexGen Management, a business management consultancy, will teach the application of business strategy and planning to a social media marketing initiative. Bill Treloar, owner of Rank Magic a search engine optimization (SEO) company that focuses on small businesses will teach Do It Yourself SEO. And Art Jones, owner of The Art of Inbound Marketing a social media marketing company will teach New Media Marketing. The workshop will focus on three areas critical to developing, launching, managing any measuring any successful Social Media campaign.

Participants will learn how to enlist Social Media Marketing to meet their 2011 goals:

• Brand Recognition
• Brand Monitoring
• Competitive Advantage
• Find New Customers
• Generate Site Traffic
• Obtain New Links To Your Site for SEO
• Increased Search Engine Rankings

Leave the session armed with a solid understanding of how to create a social media marketing and search engine optimization strategy. Participants will receive a workbook to implement their own program to take back to the office.

To confirm attendance, business owners can visit EventBrite and indicate their intention to attend.

This is a hands-on, do it yourself workshop designed to get you started on the right foot doing social media marketing and search engine optimization for your website. If you’ll be in northern New Jersey on February 14, you owe it to yourself to attend this workshop.

Darlene Victoria Gonzales runs A Virtual Perception, a podcast targeted at virtual assistants and home-based business owners. She recently interviewed Bill Treloar, owner and principal SEO consultant of Rank Magic for an overview and introduction to Search Engine Optimization.

Episode 78 of her podcast is entitled SEO Challenged? Start Here. In it, Darlene questions Bill about many aspects of search engine optimization for small business web sites:

• What is SEO?
• What about meta tags?
• Why is the difference between text content and graphical text important?
• Why can’t someone be good at both web design and SEO?
• What’s the most powerful place to put your keywords?
• What main two factors control where you rank in search engine results?
• What are some link building best practices?
• What’s the Duplicate Content Penalty?
• What constitutes a good ranking?
• What are some of your favorite SEO tools?
• What’s Google PageRank?

Have a listen!

A company that provides marketing services to law firms recently blogged about a client that had come up with an incomprehensible tagline for their firm. Taglines are pretty ubiquitous, and often they’re unintentionally meaningless. You need to avoid that if you want to hook visitors on your website and convert them into paying customers.

Certainly one thing a tagline should never be is incomprehensible. But a more common mistake is to use a tagline that’s a platitude. The folks at Y2 Marketing said it best: If your reaction to a tagline is “Well, I should hope so”, you have a platitude: a throwaway line that just takes up space. Martin Jelseme wrote about a moving company whose tagline is “the caring moving company”. Isn’t your reaction to that line, “well, I should hope so!”? That’s a platitude.

Effective taglines are difficult to craft. That’s why so many turned out by wordsmiths sound good but mean nothing. Here are some real-life examples we found on the web:

• We provide free of charge estimates.
• We provide quality service to our customers.
• Experience…knowledge…quality.
• We offer our clients on-time service, replacement and repairs done right the first time with courtesy, convenience, cleanliness, competence and character.
• Our goal is to provide you with courteous, safe, comfortable and professional service
• We Provide Quality Service!
• We will provide courteous service to all customers …
• Brakes and Brake Service – We do it right.. We do it complete!
• We provide quality service through our well trained staffs … (grammar is another topic altogether)
• We provide quality service and products on time, with no defects.
• Caring and Knowledgeable Staff
• We believe in doing it right the first time.
• We give honest service at fair prices.

When there are lots of web sites out there offering similar products and services to yours, you can’t afford to waste web space on platitudes. You need to differentiate yourself from your competition. That’s how to capture the attention of your visitors, and that’s an essential first step toward converting them into paying customers.

It takes two essential things for your web site to pay off in more sales. You need SEO to bring lots of potential customers to your site, but then you need a dynamic and compelling web site to convert those visitors into paying customers. One very effective way to improve your web site’s conversion rate is through online video marketing.

A professional video on your web site can boost your conversions by catching your visitors’ attention and illustrating what makes you special. But it can also help your search engine rankings through its presence on video sharing sites like YourTube. Those placements can bring visitors directly to your site, but the links they contain also improve your link popularity. See a great video done by SiteFire Video for one of our clients.

SiteFire Video is a new Rank Magic client, and they have an excellent video of their own to display the power of what they do. Take a look: