Masterlink Interactive Blog

Depending on how you look at it, it’s either the golden age of customer service or the cutthroat age of bullying business. Regardless, it’s the era of Twitter reviews, Chowhound critiques, and Facebook rants. Welcome to the Yelp generation.

For the most part, the web and social media have created a wonderful, vibrant community built on robust exchanges of information and opinion. Everyone has access to a bullhorn. Every customer has three or four ways to rate and review businesses. This empowers customers, and gives companies access to the feedback needed to truly hone their services around customer and client desires and needs. But it also creates a thousand new ways for your reputation to get dragged through the mud.

Techcrunch goes so far to say it plainly: “Reputation is dead.”

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.

Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access.[...]

The random slam against your restaurant anonymously left by the owner of the competitor around the corner. The Twitter flame about how bad a driver you are, complete with a link to a picture of your license plate.[...]

Our minds haven’t evolved much over the last few thousands of years, but the spread of quick fire opinions is now moving at the speed of light and forever findable on the Internet. We’re still wired to think of gossip as something that spreads quietly behind the scenes, and relatively slowly. But we’re already in a world where it’s all completely public, there are few repercussions to the person spreading it, and it is easily searchable. No wonder people freak out. We’re fish out of water.

Despite its ubiquity, the web is still a relatively new, rapidly evolving part of life for many people in America. And it might take quite a long time for our society to adapt and learn how to handle this new overload of information and opinion in a healthy way.

Unfortunately—while, yes, we should be more forgiving, more willing to take what we read with a grain of salt, and less reliant on the opinions of others—anyone who’s been the dinged with an unfair review online somewhere (even if only as result of an honest misunderstanding) or been the target of an organized smear campaign by a rival competitor knows that simply hoping for a society-wide Internet paradigm shift isn’t enough. And people seem to say things behind the mask of the Internet that they never would face-to-face.

That’s why we offer our online reputation management (ORM) service. Basically, we employ a three-step process to ensure you a reputation that’s accurately reflective of your sterling business:

• We monitor & track what’s being said about your company around the web.
• We analyze how such comments affect your brand, reputation, and, ultimately, success as a business.
• We influence the results by participating in the conversation, consulting with you to speak up in defense of your products and services, and creating positive listings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to help push down the negative results.

The last thing you want to do is be blind to the negative reviews being posted about your business.

We can give you the peace of mind that comes with both accurately understanding your own reputation and having a few tools to fight back, and basically make the unpredictable nature of user-generated content just a little bit more, well, predictable and manageable.

Contact us for more information about online reputation management.

Talk is dominated by Google when it comes to search engine optimization. It makes sense - even despite Bing’s recent surge in market share and Yahoo’s ability to stay in the game, Google still dominates the industry, responsible for almost 66 percent of all searches.

But Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL still matter (that remaining third makes up a hefty piece of the pie), and the logarithm that decides who’s king of the search engine mountain changes for each.

So do we optimize sites for each particular engine? Should you choose a specific search engine, and aim solely for rankings success there? Does one approach fit all?

Here’s how we look at it:

SEO matters in Dallas Internet marketing. Links matter. Keywords matter. Real-time and mobile-friendly web design and search elements increasingly matter, as search engines get better and better at giving you multiple ways to refine your queries. And so we’re following the SEO evolution as close as anyone, and are helping pioneer many of the techniques that are working across the industry.

But at Masterlink Interactive, we’re not obsessed with SEO gimmicks. Instead, we build smart, customized, diverse, dynamic sites that embody sound SEO fundamentals and are still (much, much more importantly) inviting, attractive, and functional for your clients. And our results prove that building that way will pay off in search engine rankings as well. For all search engines, our approach is similar — we research your business, industry, competitors, and associated keywords, and then craft a customized SEO plan for your business that attracts a new base of online customers.

Our sites are the kind that attract links organically (because they’re actually worth sharing). We recommend blogs that we keep your site fresh, linked-to, and full of long-tail keywords. And we understand that SEO is just one aspect of a comprehensive interactive marketing strategy that we’ll help you employ.

Sure, there are a bag full of search engine-specific tricks and tweaks we’ll tailor your site around to keep it ranking high. But the sites we build succeed across the search engine spectrum, and are backed by the in-touch, savvy service needed to keep up with the ever-evolving SEO landscape.

After almost 15 years in the Internet industry, I have heard so many horror stories about problems when companies use a small or one-person design “firm” to create their web presence. One of those horror stories that I have heard over and over is when those “firms’ go out of business or simply “disappear”, customers then may find out they do not own their domain name. Instead, the web designer registered themselves as the owner of the domain name. This sometimes also happens even if the designer has not gone out of business so it’s always important to know who “owns” your domain.

Today a small company with this problem called me for help, and to make matters worse, his designer did not pay to renew the domain name, which then expired. He no longer has a website or an email address and unfortunately, the best he can do is wait 60-90 days and try to register the domain name again when it becomes available. He also has to rebuild his site from scratch. Obviously, when you have advertised your website and email address, you are not only inconvenienced by this issue, but also losing business!. I’ve also heard of designers holding the domain name “hostage.” We had one small company call us who eventually had to hire an attorney and pay several thousand dollars to get control of their name – hey, but at least they saved money on their web design!

So, what can you do to protect yourself? First of all, make sure you are working with a reputable design firm that has been in business for many years. Secondly, we recommend you register the domain name yourself to insure you have complete control of the name.

If you are unsure of how your domain was registered, click on the link below, put in your domain name and make sure you are listed as the Registrant. If not, immediately do whatever is necessary to get that changed! Your business could depend on it.

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

Ok, so my SEO gurus are not going to like my title, but it’s true! Now don’t get me wrong, my SEO Specialists are the BEST and they do an excellent job of getting that wonderfully sought after target audience to your website. However, what happens when the user gets to your site? Is it easy to use? Is it compelling for the visitor? Does the web design look professional? Does it look trustworthy? Is it outdated?

A billboard or newspaper advertisement can be used to drive foot traffic to your brick and mortar store, but if the store is dirty, the merchandise is not properly organized and the service is poor, you will not make the sale. The same is true for your website – probably even more so! Whether you are selling a product or a service, your prospective online customer is going to make a judgment about your company before ever talking to a real live person or stepping into that million dollar office you occupy.

That old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression” was never more relevant than today. If that visitor to your site hits the dreaded “back” button before visiting anything more than your homepage (referred to as the bounce rate), you are dead in the water. They will not be coming back.

Now is a great time to take a retrospective look at your current site and see what can be done to catch those visitors that are coming to the site. Some great ideas for drawing those visitors in might be:

• Incorporate some interesting Flash animation to your site that also provides a valuable message to the user that will entice them to want to learn more. Don’t use movement just to see something move – your visitors do not want to be entertained.
• Prominently place a call to action on your homepage.
• Offer some type of online-only value to the visitor, a special coupon, discount, free evaluation, etc. Make sure this information is front and center when they come to your site.
• This may sound simple, but put your phone number and a contact us button on your homepage – users do not want to hunt for that information.
• The homepage should be clean and clutter-free – don’t have too many messages fighting for attention.
• Make sure the content is fresh and new – add a press release, new blog posting.
• Remove any annoying music, sound or auto-launching video.
• Employ a tagline that tells the user exactly what you do – no “cutesy” or “creative” taglines.
• If your site looks like it was designed more than 2 years ago – START OVER.

We have seen conversion rates as high as 30% on sites that are well designed with great SEO that really targets the correct visitor. Even if you are getting conversions with your current site, study your online statistics – you could be missing out on a lot of potential new business.