Meeting with a client recently, we came to an increasingly common impasse in today’s Web design world. Facebook’s dominance of the web has small businesses convinced that their Facebook links (Facebookmarks?) have to be Facebook blue, regardless of whether or not the color works in the overall design of their own websites, or with their own brands.

Brand yourself. Facebook is doing just fine on its own.

Remember, it isn’t your job to brand Facebook (or Twitter, or Tumblr or any other social media site you use). While it’s true that you’re leveraging their brands for your own needs, you’re doing so because that’s where your audience hangs out.

If your own brand or the look and feel of your website already has a lot of blues, the typical Facebook blue icon is going to either blend into the background or clash. Fortunately, blue isn’t your only option.

The argument for a blue Facebook icon is that people recognize it. But people also pick up on other visual cues, such as the shape of the “F,” or – thanks to web design conventions – the shape and placement of the badge itself. That gives you some options for Facebook badge alternatives.

Here are a few examples that break the blue rule, integrating Facebook badges in ways that

• Respect Facebook’s branding
• Build their own brands
• Give users the necessary visual clues, and
• Stand out thanks to thoughtful design

Griffith Publishing

While there is some blue in this one, it’s subtle and keyed to support Griffith’s brand, not Facebook’s. Full disclosure: this is one of ours.

barackobama.com

Note: The inclusion of the Obama 2012 website doesn’t constitute an endorsement of anything except his graphic design staff.

And they’re good. The red is visually striking, brand appropriate and patriotic. Everything you’d want in a Social Media badge on a presidential campaign website.

The Limpnickie Lot

This one is simple. Black. White. A little gradient. It’s placed prominently on the website, so you can’t miss it; the “f,” is the familiar shape, so there’s no confusion as to what it’s for.

Air1Radio

Air1 Radio does a nice job with these watermarked icons. The green matches the highlight colors of the website.

Pay Tribute to the Heroes of the Early Space Age

In the late 50s and early 60s, before Americans went to the moon or men orbited the earth, test pilots like Chuck Yeager, Gus Grissom and John Glenn risked their lives to kick start the Space Age, pushing the fastest, most dangerous, and most advanced planes in the world at that time to the very limits of their capabilities.

Now you can honor these brave individuals every time someone visits your Website.

Navigate the Web like a test pilot (without the crashing and burning)

Give your blog or Website a shot of Space Age geek cred with our new Flyby Social Media and Communication Buttons. These scalable icons, inspired by the low-tech ingenuity of early space age flight instruments, are fully customizable, easy to understand, and free for your commercial use.

Download the zip file containing the PNGs and Illustrator vector files now.

If you use Flyby, we’d love to see your implementation, so be sure to come back and post a link to your Flyby-enriched site.

In last week’s post, Writing Copy for Search Engines and People, we gave a sort of global overview of Search Engine Optimized (SEO) copy. I wanted to follow up this week with a quick and dirty post about actually writing the copy – or editing it – for SEO. Again, I’ll assume that you already have, are in the process of getting, or know that you need a keyword list or matrix.

Always Be Branding in your SEO copywriting

Before I get to those tips though, a quick reminder about any communication you have with anyone, including when you’re writing SEO content: everything you put out to the world reflects your brand. So if you write a bunch of content and post it on your website, even if the SEO is solid, if you’re unwilling to run spell check, if you make a bunch of promises you can’t deliver on, or if your copy just doesn’t make sense, you’re going to damage your brand. As I mentioned last week, for a really effective SEO-ed website, you need to be writing or buying branded SEO messaging, as opposed to “SEO copy.”

So remember, Always Be Branding when you put “pen to paper.”

5 Tips for SEO Copywriting

All that said, today I do want to focus on optimizing your copy, rather than branding it.

1. Use Your Words – They say brevity is the soul of wit. On the web, it’s also the soul of good sales copy. Unfortunately, Google (and Bing, and any other search engine you can find) likes more words than I do. Each page should be at least 250 words long, and your homepage at least 400 words long.
2. Be Dense – Keyword density is a term that refers to how many times you use a keyword or search term per page. Each term should be used at least twice, but preferably 3 or 4 times on each page. Try to use them in your headlines and subheads (H1 and H2 tags), and use them higher up the page whenever possible.
3. Be Orderly – Search terms should be used within the copy in the same order in which they appear in your keyword list. For example, if you want a page to be optimized for the term, “Champaign custom remodeling,” that phrase should appear in your copy in that exact word order. A quick note: in the hands of the wrong writers, this can make the copy read awkwardly; a good SEO copywriter can work within this constraint to produce good messaging.
4. Be Bold – Bold or italicize your keywords a couple of times on every page. But don’t overdo it; your copy will look amateurish and you’ll take an SEO hit as well. 2 or 3 times per page is sufficient, and don’t overdo the bolding and italicizing in the rest of your copy either. Never use ALL CAPS. It’s annoying.
5. Be Unique – Each page on your site should be full of interesting, persuasive, informative copy. Don’t just make lists of your keywords or links. Google knows when you do this. The search engines “want,” every page on the internet to add value, so they ignore or penalize duplicate content, out of context keyword lists and other “spammy,” copy.

Finally, and this may seem to be a “goes-without-saying,” tip, but it’s not. Get the copy done. So many web and SEO projects get hosed because the copy just isn’t done, let alone whether or not it’s any good. Set aside time to do it, or if you don’t have the time, skills or inclination to do it in-house, hire a professional to write it for you. Your web development team will thank you for it, and ultimately, so will your customers, clients, and users.

Wikipedia is blacked out today (along with Reddit, the Google doodle, and Boing Boing, and others) to protest the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and its stepchild, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The Wikipedia pages for those bills are still open for business, by the way.

Belay Streaming That Movie, Mates!

SOPA is intended to halt the sharing of copyright-protected materials over the internet (piracy), by allowing the US Dept of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders against rogue websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. According to Wikipedia,

“the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.”

The bill would also make unauthorized streaming of copyright protected content a crime.

Opponents of the bill say it amounts to censorship and first amendment rights infringement, and will cripple the internet by penalizing or shuttering sites like YouTube, Flickr, or Etsy that host user generated content. Some also argue that objectionable content – for example something posted in comments on your blog – could cause entire domains to be shut down. Proponents of the acts deny this, saying the bills are intended to target sites like the Pirate Bay that actively encourage or enable piracy or illegal sharing.

Opponents also argue that the acts criminalized are so vaguely defined that innocent users could be swept up in the potential internet dragnet.

Where there’s a will…

Regardless of your stance on these bills, if you need to get to wikipedia today, the New York Times’ Bits Blog can help you out.

If you’re reading this blog, I’m going to assume you already have at least some idea of what I’m talking about, so I’ll spare you a detailed explanation; if you need a primer, click over to seOverflow.

Copy is the most misunderstood element of SEO.

Copy is just one element of SEO, and it’s often the last element to be considered. And I think it’s the most misunderstood element as well, and usually the least effectively implemented. The source of the misunderstanding is that web marketers and writers lose sight of what they’re doing on the web in the first place, and are seduced by all the metrics and what-have-you. They end up focusing purely on making sure they’re meeting the needs of the search engines, so the copy ends up boring, awkward, or just an unnatural-sounding pileup of keywords and search terms.

So here’s the dirty little secret.

SEO copywriting is just like regular copywriting.

What? Then why do so many websites have such terrible SEO copy?

Well, first of all, copy is hard. Writing copy for the Web is even harder; and blending Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into the mix takes something that’s difficult in the first place, and adds a layer of apparent mystery that makes it seem pretty much impossible for you to do well.

How to get started writing SEO copy that works.

Keyword research
This post is about writing copy. We’ll assume you’ve already done keyword research, you know how to do it, or you’ve contracted with a vendor to do it, so I won’t delve into it any further here.

All good writing starts with audience awareness
Whether you’re talking about the great American novel, or the great brochure you picked up at the tanning salon yesterday, there is no possible way to overstate the importance of speaking to your audience. Marketing copy is no exception to this rule, and either is SEO copy. In the case of web copy, you have 2 meta-audiences – people and search engines. These audiences each have completely separate and unrelated needs and your job, as the SEO writer, is to meet them.

Always remember, you’re optimizing content for search engines, but creating it for people. So come up with great, compelling content for you human audience, just as you would when writing standard marketing copy. Then come back and edit (or optimize) it for the Search Engines. That way, you ensure that you’ll be fulfilling your ultimate goal – making sales.

Related but separate point – traffic doesn’t keep the lights on
Traffic is awesome. Traffic is necessary. The more visitors, the merrier. But if your prospects get to your site and the content isn’t any good: if it’s boring, incoherent, unpersuasive, or unprofessional, you’re not going to make the sales you need to pay for all this wonderful keyword research, the Pay Per Click campaign, and your Google ads.

What you’re really looking for is branded SEO messaging. That is, messaging and copy that fulfills the SEO requirements of keyword density and placement, while simultaneously reinforcing your core brand promises, and selling the benefits of your products and services.

Titles and headlines are key
Here’s a case where search engines and people are on the same page. You need to include your search terms in your headlines (h-tags). Your readers’ eyes will naturally gravitate to your headlines.

So make sure your headlines are selling the benefits persuasively, and include your search terms and you’ll be effectively serving both your masters.

Missing links
There are three types of links.

1. External (your copy links out to someone else’s website). When you’re thinking about including an external link, consider whether or not the content at the target of that link is appropriate for your site. By linking to it, you’re endorsing it; you’re incorporating it by implication into your own site. Don’t link too much. Your copy will look all spammy.
2. Internal (you link to another, related page on your website). If you’re writing a blog post about SEO copywriting, and SEO copywriting is one of your services, link to your SEO copywriting landing page.
3. Backlinks (a link from someone else’s site back to yours). When you include an external link, take a few minutes to email the owner of the site you linked to. Lots of times they’ll return the favor. Otherwise, creating good, useful, persuasive content is the best way to get backlinks, and is another instance in which creating great content for humans is the best way to make the Search Engines happy as well.

Don’t duplicate content
Search engines ignore duplicate content, such as if you offer several shirts, the only difference being their size or color. Don’t just copy and paste the descriptions of each shirt, substituting the color or size. Seize this opportunity to create more unique, useful, keyword enriched content for Google or Bing to discover, index and rank.

This local branding story does my heart good because it combines a bunch of my favorite things in one story: branding, cheeseburgers, and local business success stories.

Denver-based Smashburger is Forbes’ #1 most promising company, thanks in large part to a strong brand strategy.

Strong branding will drive sales and growth.

Smashburger’s branding has been in the news quite a bit lately, because the company is investing in its conviction that smart branding will drive long term sales and growth. Despite being only a few years old and not really being a national power (yet) in the quick service, casual restaurant space, Smashburger plans to expand internationally into Latin America and the Middle East in 2012. This is an unusual move, as most restaurant chains aim to saturate the markets they already operate in before pursuing aggressive expansion.

The difference here is that Smashburger is taking tech brands like Google as a model, treating their brand as a sales tool and growth driver, and assuming that success with this strategy will allow them to circle back to grow locally.

The take away.

According to this interview with the Huffington Post, one of the secrets of Smashburger’s success is that they hired experienced hotel and restaurant managers to run the locations that Smashburger owns (about half are franchised). This aspect of their success made me think back a bit to the dot com bust. A lot of companies with apparently strong brands, interesting products and great ideas didn’t make it – they never became profitable, grew too fast and flamed out, or couldn’t secure enough capital. I think many of these promising companies failed because they didn’t pay enough attention to the fundamentals.

Smashburger’s combination of business innovation, brand strategy, and attention to the basics seem destined to help the brand succeed where its predecessors have failed.

What lessons does Smashburger’s success offer other startups and emerging businesses? Here are 4:

• Strong branding is a sales and growth tool

This one is important to us here at Phases obviously, but it’s nice to see a company truly leveraging brand awareness to drive their growth. Lots of smallish and midsize companies give great branding lip service, but not a lot of them follow through on it with real conviction.

• Offset innovation with experience, especially in finance and operations

A great idea will still become an epic fail if not executed properly. Take your great new idea and back it up with real experience and expertise.

• Treat corporate culture as part of brand

We talk quite a bit at Phases about the importance of internal branding, and the Forbes story teases out an instance where internal branding is an integral element of Smashburger’s success. They “over invest in what’s really important,” incentivizing speedy service and good customer reviews with cash money, and by keeping a psychologist on retainer to assess potential managers’ aptitude for the high-stress hospitality industry. This demonstrates that their brand promise of serving a “better burger,” is implemented at every level of the business.

• Look in unusual places for business role models

Great branding and business lessons are all around you at successful companies. When you’re looking for new ideas to grow or improve your business, look everywhere, not just within your marketspace.

That’s why this year I’m keeping things simple, quantifiable and branding-related.

Want to blog more? Don’t just “resolve to blog.” Resolve to blog twice a week. It’s easy to tell if you’ve done that; just count your blog entries. Want to tweet more? Resolve to set a number of tweets per day and put them in your calendar. Easy to track!

These 5 branding resolutions are measurable and specific.

1)  Do a brand review (yes, Phases offers one of these – call us! We’ll tell you all about it!).

How long has it been since you’ve had a logo refresh? Do you need one? How’s your website looking? Is your messaging straight outta 1998? Is the information up to date? How about your print collateral? Is your branding cohesive, distinct and recognizable across all your marketing platforms?

2) Blog

Just a couple of posts a week. 2 to 3 hours tops. I know it often seems like there’s no more time in the day for this (I have a hard time finding the time and energy, myself), but blogging is an important way to push company news out, build your credibility, burnish your reputation as a thought leader, and keep your name in front of people – even when you don’t have a new product or service offering.

3) Tweet

This is more and more critical to building your community. Twitter is a surprisingly intimate and conversational medium, and so is very effective at allowing your clients and prospects to get to know you better in a non-pushy way. Set aside a half hour in the morning and a half hour at the end of the day or in the evening to tweet (or schedule them to go out twice a day at given times).

4)  Scour the web for good news and reviews about your company.

Did a happy customer leave a glowing review on Yelp!? Link to it from your blog, Facebook page or Twitter account. Contact that person and ask them to turn their review into a real testimonial. Google, Yelp!, Citysearch, and eBay are good places to look. Industry specific listing sites are also good places to find reviews. This is also a good way to catch any negative energy that’s out there and take steps to correct or prevent customer experience, or other issues.

5)  Get your employees involved.

Your employees are a bigger part of your brand than you probably understand. They’re dealing with your customers everyday in person, on the phone, or via email. They understand what your customers are saying about your company and your brand. They also often have great insights about communicating your brand promises and values to your customers. If you get them actively involved, their buy-in will magically transform into enthusiasm.

Of course, as with all New Year’s resolutions the key to making your branding resolutions stick is to execute them consistently and regularly. That’s why it’s important to keep things measurable and simple. So stop reading about them! Get out there and make it happen.

Let’s make 2012 a great branding year!

HireFlo is a very simply, and powerful tool, that let’s you track, organize and prioritize applicants for available jobs. Since we are hiring for a new Web developer, I was fully in sync with the pains this tools provides a solution to. No more filing away emails, printed resumes, etc. It’s all in one place, and displays the job postings on your site, as well as organizing where the applicants found the job (craigslist, your site, SimplyHired, etc.)

I think  my favorite part though, is the good old fashioned customer service from Rudy. After testing out the app, I received nice simple reply from Rudy asking if we had any feedback. Me  being me, of course I had feedback and a small question (always trying to make things better!) Right away, I received a reply back with answers and updates in a super friendly tone.

Kudo’s to Rudy, his new app, and the stellar customer service.

Free For Life Promotion

You can check out the app for yourself, and sign up for their Free for Life Promotion (ending January 31, 2012). http://hireflo.com/

Happy New Year, and happy employee hunting!

After your logo, your tagline may be the most important, or at least most prominent element of your identity. It functions as one of the first and most persistent things your clients will see, hear, and hopefully remember about your company.

A good tagline captures your company’s, product’s, or campaign’s essence in a few short, catchy words. It says something significant about your core brand promise and how you deliver on that promise. It differentiates you from your competition and helps you position your company or product.

Show some emotion.

A great tagline takes everything that a good tagline does and adds feelings to the mix. It creates a memorable, emotional response in the reader. Just do it. That’s exciting. You’re in good hands. That’s comforting. It’s everywhere you want to be. That’s reassuring. The common denominator with these truly great taglines is the effort to build emotion into the equation.

Avoid these 5 mistakes that make your tagline boring, meaningless or forgettable.

1. Ignore your core brand promise and your company’s core competencies

Make sure you don’t address what your company is really great at: the one thing that you can do that no one else will or can do. Federal Express’ great tagline, When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight is a model of distilling a brand differentiator into a memorable, witty phrase.

2. Ignore your target market demographics and psychographics

The great taglines are conversational. They’re phrases you might use in a everyday (extremely erudite) conversation with your witty friends. You should know enough about your ideal customer or clients to be able to create a client profile and imagine how you’d talk to that person.

An example of this type of tagline fail is Playtex’s Is that a Playtex under there?, which sounds like the set up to a bad sexist joke. Dumb move if your target market is women.

3. Make it vague

Ames Rubber’s tagline is Excellence through total quality. Could this phrase not be applied with equal meaning to any… ANY company that has produced anything in the last 100 years?

4.  Make it really long

A tagline should be like a great car: just big enough to fill up the garage, but not so big that it breaks the windows. If your tagline is too long, it’ll be hard to remember and say. The exception that proves the rule? There are some things that money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Master Card.

Otherwise 4 to 7 well-chosen words is a good rule of thumb.

5. Jam it full of jargon or meaningless business-speak

UPS has one of the most revered and recognizable logos in branding history. But for some reason, in 2003, the company added the phrase Synchronizing the World of Commerce to the iconic Paul Rand-designed shield and package.

None of these words are especially jargon-y by themselves, but taken as a unit, it sounds like the kind of claptrap you’d get if you created a computer program to randomly generate catchphrases from slightly out of date business buzzwords.

Think of it as a great pick up line.

It seems like a no-brainer, but remember that your tagline needs to be a conversation starter. If you were having a conversation with someone you wanted to get to know at a club or coffee shop, you wouldn’t just drone on about yourself all night.

When you create a tagline, you’re really trying to start a conversation and begin a relationship. Ask yourself, is this a good way to start a conversation? Will this help establish a connection to our target market? If the answer to those questions is no, keep brainstorming.

Phases Design Studio is an established branding and marketing firm located in Denver’s exciting and painfully hip RINO art district, with onsite food, fitness facilities and an inspiring, creative atmosphere.  Our clients range from small startups to established local companies; and we are proud to say that they love working with us.

We have a home for a full-time, in-studio, web developer

As our stellar new web developer, you will be working as part of our full branding team; responsible for heading up web development projects for our clients. Daily activities can include everything from adding small functionality to an existing site, team meetings with new clients to determine specifications for their new site, or implementing a well-planned and structured site in a CMS framework.

What we like about you

• you’re an HTML and CSS ninja who can deliver pixel perfect code from our design files.
• you have kick-ass Javascript, jQuery, and PHP,  development skills (WordPress and Drupal; Magento is a plus, but not required)
• you’re a detail oriented self-starter
• you deliver great work on deadline
• you’re committed to outstanding customer service
• you have at least 3-years of web development experience

What you will like about us

• successful, growing, and established company
• challenging and diverse projects
• fun and flexible environment (options for part-time telecommuting available) with good people (and office dogs)

Interested?

Include the following with you apply and, if selected, we’ll invite you over to meet the team, check out the studio and pet the dogs!

• 2 examples of sites you’ve developed in WordPress, with explanations of any custom functionality and/or plugins you’ve developed or coded
• 1 additional example of a site you have developed in any other CMS

Apply