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.

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.

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.

You do have an email newsletter, right?

Sending out a periodic email newsletter can help draw customers and prospects in to important pages on your website or to relevant blog posts. But how many read them?

Very often statistics from your email newsletter host will show that a relatively small percentage of readers actually click on any links to your website or blog. In fact, you’re likely to find that lots of recipients don’t even open your newsletter. (Some may view it in preview mode and unless they click on something that doesn’t count as an open. But still, a low open rate indicates a problem.)

Mistina Picciano of MarketItWrite offers 8 tips to make sure people read your newsletter. If you have a low open rate, focus on her tip #2: Use subjects that say “read me”. A compelling subject line to your email will get people to open them. That’s a subject we at Rank Magic discovered late in the game. For years our monthly newsletters had a subject line something like Rank Magic SEO Newsletter for April. Does that make you want to stop and read it? I didn’t think so. Last month’s newsletter hinted at some of the content inside with this subject line: Disappearing Rankings | SEO Myths | Google on Article & Social Media Marketing. A bit better, but not as compelling as it could have been. A better subject line might have been Why Did My Rankings Disappear? or perhaps Don’t Believe These Dangerous SEO Myths!.

Better newsletter subjects is something we need to work on, and chances are it’s something you need to work on, too.

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.

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.

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.

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.