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.

Major search engines use semantically related words to figure out what each web page is really about. Using semantically related words can help reduce the sense of keyword stuffing on your pages, and cement the concept you’re trying to get across.

What are semantically-related words? How do they help search engines figure out what your page is about? Take a couple of simple examples. Paris might be a city in France, and Hilton might be a hotel chain. But used together on a page suggests the page is about a woman. A tiger is a wild feline, and the woods might be where Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother lives. But when used together, those words indicate the page is probably about golf.

Using a proper mix of semantically related words on your page can improve its relevance score in the search engines’ ranking algorithms. To find out what other words Google finds related to a given keyword, search for a keyword and add a tilde (~) in front of it. Google will mark the related keywords in bold on the result page. It seems that Google finds the word “Nokia” related to “phone”, for example, and “movies” is related to “TV”.

Business owners often unwittingly commit one or more of five common web site mistakes that silently cost them tons of money in lost business. Read through this list and make sure you’re not making one of these mistakes.

1. Writing content that focuses on features instead of benefits. As business owners, we’re intimately close to our features. But the customer wants to know what’s in it for him or her. Those are benefits. Nail those, and you make the sale.
2. Not making your web site search engine friendly. The most egregious example of this is a snazzy, all-flash website. Beautiful, but totally unfriendly to search engines. With one of those, customers will never find you unless they already know your name. But there are less obvious mistakes of this type that are made al lot, especially with navigation the search engines can’t follow, text inside graphics where search engines can’t read it, and more.
3. Failing to keep your web site fresh. Fresh content encourages the search engines to visit you more often, and offers new opportunities to use variations on keyword phrases people are searching for. Done right, it can also act as link bait.
4. Not having a call to action. Ask your visitor to call you, to buy, to request more information. Why do you suppose at McDonalds they always ask “Do you want fries with that?” That simple call to action sells tons of fries every year.
5. Making it too hard for customers to buy from you. Don’t require a login to shop on your site. You might implement that at checkout, but far to many sites require a visitor to log in before they can ever peruse the merchandise. Bad idea!

Karon Thackston, an SEO copywriting expert, wrote a very helpful article in High Rankings Advisor about customer-focused copy. Customer-focused copy won’t help or hinder your rankings in the search engines, but SEO is not really, in the ultimate sense, about rankings. It’s about sales — selling your products or services. Getting high rankings and bringing tons of visitors to your site is useless if the content on your site drives visitors away before you have a chance to snag them as customers. Customer-focused copy is all about conversions: engaging your visitors so they convert from visitors to customers, clients, or patients. Karon writes:

I am literally shocked that — after decades of marketing evangelists preaching “It’s not about you!” — website owners still don’t get it. What’s not to understand? Copy that focuses strictly on your company and practically or completely ignores your prospects doesn’t work nearly as well as copy that speaks to your target customers in their language and about the benefits they will receive.

Karon provides a couple of revealing before-and-after examples and introduces us to a Customer Focus Calculator. This is a neat tool that will reveal how customer-focused (or YOU-focused) a page on your web site is, compared to hoe self-focused (or ME-focused) it is.

One of our clients has a site which I’ve advised him seems too ME-focused. I ran his home page through the Customer Focus Calculator and he got a score of 83% self-focused and 17% customer-focused. Then, with my fingers crossed for luck, I checked the Rank Magic blog. Whew! We scored 70% customer-focus and 30% self-focus.

Try it on your own web site.

Site Reference recently published a thought-provoking article about how to write for search engines. It covers some good ideas, but I want to give you an important principle before we discuss any of that. Always write for your target market  – people  – before you eventhink about search engines. Keyword stuffing and awkward prose will drive visitors away from your web site before they even consider doing business with you.

With that caveat out of the way, here are some of the items of value from this article:

1. It’s all about content. And that’s more than just the words on the page. Content includes headings, page titles, tags, and links (both to other material on your site and to external sites).
2. A keyword-rich and compelling Page Title is essential.
3. Use heading tags for your headings and sub-headings, and use your keywords in these headings.
4. Focus. Keep to one topic per page.
5. Use your keywords naturally in your body copy.
6. Use keywords in the meta description tag, in link anchor text, and so forth.
7. Get to the point quickly.

First impressions count. And your web site need to make two good first impressions, as we pointed out last month. First, you need to impress the search engines and convince them to rank you near the top for your chosen keyword phrases. But getting people to your site does you no good unless your copy can convert them into paying customers. So the second good first impression you need to make is on the human visitor to your web page. You only have a few seconds to convince your visitor that he or she is on the right page for what they’re looking for. Then you need to convince them that you’re a company they want to do business with.

These aren’t really conflicting goals, but you won’t achieve them both by accident. You need to carefully write copy that addresses both. Rebecca Appleton, Operating Director at UK SEO agencyTop Position has written a nice piece for a recent issue of Search Marketing Standard. <I recommend it to you.>

The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don’t get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, and keyword density, that you forget your site’s content. We have copywriting services that can help if you find yourself with writer’s block when you need to update the content on your web site! Here’s a good article by UpMarketContent.com.

Jacob Nielson, the famous usability expert, recently did an experiment that shows web content designed for lower literacy users helps higher literacy users, too. Apparently 30% of web users are “low-literacy” users; these are people who can read, but who have difficulty doing so. This is not a function of intelligence; many people with dyslexia are highly intelligent.

Nielsen says “The most notable difference between lower- and higher-literacy users is that lower-literacy users can’t understand a text by glancing at it. They must read word for word and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words.”

His article covers the characteristics of  low-literacy users, how to improve usability for low literacy users, how large the low-literacy population is, and who should care about low-literacy users.

I found fascinating his study that shows improving usability for low-literacy users significantly helps higher-literacy users as well, at the 5% level of significance.

I recommend his article.