A couple weeks ago, we mentioned that Google got 2012 rolling with a big splash by introducing its new “Search Plus Your World.” Now, when you search for something while signed into a Google account (which you likely are automatically if signed into something like Gmail), results will include little bits of “recommendations” by your Google contacts sprinkled in.



Cool, right? No? Hate it? Have no desire at all to know what your friends recommend every time you search for a Dallas auto-mechanic? Annoyed that Google incorporates Google+ results for companies, even if you’ve never use Google+?



Don’t worry — a small-time Silicon Valley programmer named Mark Zuckerberg has your back.



In an unusual twist, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace (still around, apparently) have publicly teamed up and introduced a “bookmarklet” that allows you to return social search results based on relevancy from across the web and not solely, as Google would have it, from their own network, enabling social results to populate in three areas on Google — “People and Pages,” organic results and the results typeahead.


So why would a couple tech rivals publicly describe what they think “Google should be?” And why does it matter to your company?



Myspace would probably team up with anyone who could help return them to relevance at this point, so there’s no reason to put much stock in their involvement. But Facebook and Twitter openly teaming up to do something like this (and bragging about it) is definitely noteworthy. Most likely, Facebook is doing this because they’re just a teensy-weensy bit threatened by Google’s move into the social media arena. While Google has dominated search, Facebook has been steadily stockpiling the kinds of personal information that Google is now integrating into search. If Facebook didn’t have personalized search plans of its own, it wouldn’t care so much what Google does. But apparently they both have similar big ideas for personalized search — here’s why:



Social changing the way people and businesses, do, well, seemingly everything. Eat. Drink. Shop. Watch TV. Listen to music. All of it can be social, and much of it can be enhanced by social media. It’s useful for friends and families, of course, but also for big-spending American businesses. Building the platform that can harness and search through everything that social media adds to the web, therefore, is enormously lucrative and what this battle of digital age titans is all about. 



In other words, personalized search is a high-stakes game for a reason. And that’s why this heavyweight fight matters in the Dallas social media marketing ring as well — they’re battling to come up with the best way to help businesses like yours connect with an unprecedented number of potential customers and clients.



Our Dallas Internet marketing specialists can help your company craft a customized social media marketing strategy that harnesses these ever-evolving new powers and open up new channels to connect with folks out there who are looking for a company exactly like yours.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal describes the function of search engines like his in just about the best way possible. “Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more,” he says.

Imagine the impact of such a tool. Okay fine — no need to imagine. Just log and start exploring distant corners of the information universe. It really is a miracle. Or at least it should feel like the most ridiculously amazing, enriching and empowering human achievement in the long, ridiculous history of human achievement. Find the information/art/music/entertainment/community/birthday gift/driving directions/restaurant recommendation/cloud-stored memory you need within milliseconds of banging your fingers against a few keys.

Show up in 17th century New England with an iPhone, and you’d likely be crowned king (if not first burned at the stake with the other witches).

But Singhal also highlights what’s lacking in this otherwise-marvelous tool — and demonstrates what his pioneering company is doing about it.

“Clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

As a child, my favorite fruit was Chikoo, which is exceptionally sweet and tasty. A few years back when getting a family dog, we decided to name our sweet little puppy after my favorite fruit. Over the years we have privately shared many pictures of Chikoo (our dog) with our family. To me, the query [chikoo] means two very sweet and different things, and today’s improvements give me the magical experience of finding both the Chikoos I love, right in the results page.”

Check out what Google is calling “Search, Plus Your World”. More social. More personal. More elements like personal profiles, shared websites, and results directly related to folks you know.

See the advantage?

Many of these features have been featured in Google results for some time now, especially pages recommended by contacts you might have if you use Gmail or Google-Plus. But what’s new is the intentionality of it — you can actually search specifically for results related to folks you know, as well as decide what you want to show up. Google-Plus profiles will also show up in auto-recommend while searchers are typing in their queries.

The move makes sense. In many ways, the core aim of this is the same thing that has many techies speculating that Facebook might one day conquer the search giant at its own game — access to information that’s tailored to the unique worlds that each searcher lives in. Facebook tends to have lots of information about its users. Google is getting there as well. That’s the future of search.

We’ll get into more of why this matters to Dallas businesses in the future, but you can imagine its implications on social media marketing, search engine optimization, and mobile web and search. In the meantime, our Dallas social media marketing and Dallas SEO specialists are happy to help you devise an Internet marketing strategy unique to your company’s needs.

In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, “long tail keywords” are less common, but less competitive search terms that search engine users might find a certain website. And for the past several years, SEO specialists have considered focusing on long tail keywords a savvy alternative for smaller websites instead of focusing on highly competitive “trophy keywords” or “head keywords”.

For example, your cute sidewalk coffee lounge is probably not going to beat out Starbucks for the term “coffee shop.” But you might just carve out a niche for “Lower Greenville coffee shop” — and if you have enough content on your site, you’re likely to get lucky for long, meandering search queries like “Lower Greenville sidewalk cafe with coffee.”

But through a variety of tweaks made over time, Google has made long tail search terms somewhat less relevant. According to a handy infographic from SEO Book (it’s too large to post here, but we suggest you take a look at it), several adjustments are to blame:

For example, Google Instant (where results show up as soon as you start typing) features that nifty little drop-down menu full of “suggested” search terms. This sort of funnels searchers into fewer and fewer terms, as you’re likely to just click one of the suggestions instead of typing out your full query.

In other words, if you start typing out “Dallas eye doctor,” Google suggests “Dallas eye care” long before you finish. This means that “Dallas eye care” is likely to become a much more valuable keyword than “Dallas eye doctor” (even though they mean basically the same thing) because more people are going to use it. This especially affects long-tail keywords. Many long-tail search terms come when searchers aren’t exactly sure what to search for, so they’ll Google something like: “Dallas eye doctor eye care.” Google’s suggestions help searchers get there just a bit more quickly.

Make sense? Two takeaways:

Accuracy is Important: You Won’t Just Get Lucky

As the drop down suggestions guide people into fewer and fewer search queries, a small number of search queries are going to become far more valuable. This means that careful, professional keyword research is critical. Simply “guessing” which keywords searchers are looking for isn’t going to cut it.

The Game Just Got More Competitive: You Won’t Win Without Playing

Unfortunately, this also means that competition is going to be a little bit more fierce as more and more companies focus on fewer and fewer keywords. So an effective, comprehensive search engine optimization strategy is critical.

Our Dallas SEO specialists can help: they’re able to conduct accurate, cutting-edge keyword research that gives you a competitive edge in knowing how to optimize your site. And they’ll help you implement a full, well-rounded, sustainable SEO strategy that gets your site in front of the search engine users who are looking for it.

The first time we talked about Google+ here on the Masterlink blog, it was exploding onto the Internet marketing scene. Just a few weeks later, the bubble seemed to already have popped: overall usage of Google+ dropped by three percent, and time spent on the site dropped 10 percent.

So, nearly three months later, how is it doing now? Well, 40 million people now have Google+ profiles — just a fraction of Facebook’s 800 million users, but a sizable number nonetheless. And, perhaps more relevantly, Google+ for businesses has arrived.

According to the AP:

The expansion, announced on Monday, is the latest feature on Google’s Plus service to imitate what’s already available on Facebook, the leading website for sharing with family, friends and businesses.

Google Inc. unveiled Plus in late June to counter Facebook’s popularity and learn more about people’s interests. It hopes to gain insights that will help its dominant Internet search engine spit out more compelling results that keep people coming back to click on ads.

Until now, Plus was open only to individuals. In addition to companies, celebrities and sports teams will be able to set up Google Plus pages just as they can on Facebook. Google showcased the new Plus feature Monday with pages from 20 business, celebrities and sports teams. The initial list includes Toyota, the Muppets, the Dallas Cowboys, Pepsi and the pop music group Train.

So is Google+ worth becoming part of your Dallas social media marketing efforts? Here are just a handful of reasons to give it a try:

1. Fewer users means less competition as well

Sure, Google+ is still just something like a fox trying to take down the Facebook elephant, but think of it like starting up a business in a small town. There are fewer customers, but less competition as well. And if the town grows (which it’s likely to do), you’ll have a huge head start on the competition that eventually moves in down the block.

2. It’s all about search

Already, if you have a Google account, search results will show you pages that have earned “Plus 1” clicks by connections of yours on Google+. In other words, imagine search engines pointing out Dallas caterers, auto body shops in DFW, or Dallas limos “Liked” by your friends on Facebook every time you go searching for one. Google’s bread and butter is search, and it’s a good bet that they will increasingly use info gleaned from Google+ to improve their search capabilities.

3. It’s easy and free

In other words, give it a try and see what bites you get. If you find yourself connecting with potential customers and clients, stick with it. If not, pull the plug.

To learn more, check out Google’s handy step-by-step tutorial. It’s pretty easy, but if you don’t want to sink a ton of time into maintaining your Google+ page and responding to every post from a reader, our Dallas interactive marketing specialists will be more than happy to do it for you.

If you want to understand how web giants like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon should influence the long-term vision for your business, it’s a good idea to spend some time exploring their long-term visions.

This is especially true if:

• If you’re overwhelmed by how quickly what matters on the web changes
• If you get the feeling what’s happening on the web matters, but you just don’t have the time to keep up with it all
• If you don’t think the web can play much a role in your business or industry
• If you’d love to see the big picture, but the forest keeps getting obscured by the hype involved with each tree

Look long-term. Get an idea of where these guys want to take your business. Understand the road the web is trying to travel, and it’ll be a whole lot easier to keep up with each twist and turn.

For example, Fast Company Magazine took a long, but illuminating at look each of the major web giants. Step one is to understand that while Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple all might seem to be competing in separate spheres, in many ways they’re all trying to climb the same peak.

According to the article:

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google don’t recognize any borders; they feel no qualms about marching beyond the walls of tech into retailing, advertising, publishing, movies, TV, communications, and even finance. Across the economy, these four companies are increasingly setting the agenda. Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Page look at the business world and justifiably imagine all of it funneling through their servers. Why not go for everything? And in their competition, each combatant is getting stronger, separating the quartet further from the rest of the pack.

Everyone reading this article is a customer of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google, and most probably count on all four. This passion for the Fab Four of business is reflected in the blogosphere’s panting coverage of their every move. ExxonMobil may sometimes be the world’s most valuable company, but can you name its CEO? Do you scour the Internet for rumors about its next product? As the four companies encroach further and further into one another’s space, consumers look forward to cooler and cooler products. The coming years will be fascinating to watch because this is a competition that might reinvent our daily lives even more than the four have changed our habits in the past decade. And that, dear reader, is why you need a program guide to the battle ahead.

Here’s why understanding this major trend toward both convergence and real-world diversification matters: These companies aren’t just building products like an excellent search engine, a cool phone, a convenient shopping marketplace, or a social network. They’re building platforms for making multiple areas of life easier, from shopping to communicating to connecting to doing business and beyond.

That’s the race — who can come up with the best, most comprehensive tool for making the web improve the most possible areas of life for the most people. Understand that, and you’ll be more likely spot opportunities for your company on these platforms when they open up.

Anyway, it’s a long, but fascinating look at where the worlds of search, social, and online shopping are all going (and where they’ll converge). Our Dallas Internet marketing specialists are here to help you stay up with what matters.

Nearly $6.2 trillion is spent by American consumers each year, and Google is making it easier than ever for us to do it. How much of that will be spent at your business?

The search behemoth launched Google Wallet this week — an extraordinary app that uses near-field-communication (NFC) technology, which lets customers make contact-less payments by simply waving their phone in front of an NFC-chip reader (using Mastercard’s existing PayPass network).

The effect on local commerce could be enormous. According to Search Engine Land:

For more than a decade people have prophesied the end of cash and credit cards. And for the past two years the drumbeat around mobile payments has grown steadily louder with the adoption of smartphones. Now numerous companies are jockeying to participate in what expected to be a huge market that will eventually generate billions in fees and revenue.

In the same way that Apple redefined and accelerated the development of the smartphone market with the iPhone in 2007, Google Wallet marks the beginning of the mobile payments era. Google is certainly not the first company operating in the sector, and it might not turn out to be the leader. But with last week’s announcement, Google has helped to bring new coherence and focus to the otherwise Darwinian and chaotic landscape of mobile payments.

Keep in mind that Wallet’s debut makes for a very a soft launch. It’s currently only available in a handful of cities (not Dallas-Ft. Worth yet) with a handful of cards, and it only works on Google’s Android Nexus S phones. So far.

But it’s definitely the start of a new era. The technology should soon be available on any smartphone toting an NFC-enabled sticker. And while Google seems to have launched the first strike, Apple and Paypal are both also reported to be on the verge of launching their own mobile payments technology soon. And don’t forget about Square. Launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Square is a nifty card-swiper that plugs into the headphone jack of your smartphone or iPad and basically turns it into a mobile cash register (imagine the possibilities for small businesses with that technology).

The big lesson for Dallas small businesses is simple: local search matters, and will only matter more and more as new technologies kick in.

Smartphones are becoming an increasingly large part of consumer-business relationships in America — for both e-commerce and in-store commerce. Nearly 43 percent of Americans will own smartphones by the end of 2015, and more than 90 million smartphones will be purchased in 2011 alone. Customers will increasingly expect to be able to find, procure, and now pay for products or services with their phones.

So it’s critical that potential customers can actually find your local business’ mobile web design on their smartphones when they go searching for you.

Let’s say you own an auto body shop in Dallas. When folks search for “Dallas body shops” on Google or Google Maps, or go looking for the best Dallas body shop on a review index like Yelp, it’s a good idea to be highly visible in those places.

Local search marketing requires a bit of effort and constant awareness of new customer and technological trends, but our Dallas local search marketing specialists can help. Contact us for more information.

There’s been some concern lately about whether or not shortened URLs can undermine a company’s search engine optimization efforts.

Let’s review what this means:

URL Shorteners

The shortened URLs were developed in response to Twitter, where messages must be limited to 140 characters or less. Even simple links (http://www.masterlink.com) can take up an unhealthy chunk of that space, and long, messy links (http://www.masterlink.com/blog/index.php/smartphones-to-surpass-computers-and-other-mobile-trends-for-2011/) can be utterly unusable.

So, in a stroke of the sort of innovation that makes us love the digital age, several tools (bit.ly, is.gd, tinyurl.com) soon popped up to shorten those long URLs and make them more Twitter-friendly. Web heavyweights like Google and the New York Times have also recently developed their own shorteners.

Why Links to Your Site Matter

Search engines take into account the number and value of links out across the web that point toward your website. When other websites link to your site, it signals to the search engines that your site is valued by others. Search engines try to promote valued sites in their search results rankings.

Make sense?

When someone clicks on the shortened URL, it takes them (briefly) to that actual URL, before quickly redirecting them to their intended destination. So this begs the question—do shortened links that don’t go directly to a company’s website still benefit their search engine optimization?

According to Google SEO anxiety whisperer Matt Cutts:

“Custom URL shorteners are essentially just like any other redirects,” he explains. “If we try to crawl a page, and we see a 301 or permanent redirect, which pretty much all well-behaved URL shorteners (like bit.ly or goo.gl) will do, if we see that 301 then that will pass PageRank to the final destination. So in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your SEO,” he continues. “The PageRank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”

Got it? In plain speak, Matt’s basically saying: “Keep calm and carry on.”

Basically, the same algorithm that Google uses to “crawl” the web and follow links around is smart enough to follow the path all the way to the intended destination, and not get stuck in that shortened URL netherworld in between. In other words, you’ll still get SEO credit whether a link to your site is 10 characters long or 50.

If these sorts of twists and turns in the SEO world concern you, consider letting our Dallas interactive marketing specialists do the worrying for you. We’ll make sure your company pops up when a searcher goes looking for you.

Kady Bentley: Hey everyone, my name is Kady, SEO Specialist and Project Manager here at Masterlink Interactive. Today my goal is to convey the importance of mobile websites and why they should be a part of your business marketing plan. We’re living in a world where we fly by the seat of our pants. We try to keep up with our day to day tasks and anything that makes it more convenient less time consuming is always a bonus and tools that do that are definitely worth your investment. Mobile websites are one of those tools that your customers will find useful in order ti find out your business information. Basically at Masterlink, we try to focus on different key features for mobile websites, but a few of them in particular I’d like to highlight are that it’s essential on a mobile website to feature your contact information and your driving directions so customers can find your information easily, they don’t have to search through your website so they can get to you sooner.

Displaying this information in large fonts that are easy to read is also a benefit instead of having to scroll, like on an iPhone where you can maximize font size, but if you already have it portrayed larger, it’s easier for the customer to see what they’re looking for and get to you.

Also, having simple navigation is very key. Since 3G is fast, but not super fast, if you have a navigation that is condensed and only focusing on the main things you’d like to highlight, it will make speed times faster and people will be able to find your information quicker.

If you’d like to learn more about mobile websites and how they can help your business, we are definitely here to help you contact Masterlink and we’d be happy to get you to the next level of marketing.

Kevin Adams: Hello, my name is Kevin Adams I’m the paid search and analytics specialists at Masterlink Interactive. The question I want to answer for the day is how important is it to know the traffic to your web site; and I would say it’s extremely important. Commonly people will find that they are getting tons of traffic but suddenly they realize they’re not getting very many sales. Everyone wants to go back and change their business plan, change their messaging, panic starts setting in. But before you do that, it’s important to go back and find out where the people are finding you from. Are they coming in through email? Are they coming in through blogs? Are they coming in through search engine traffic? Any number of sources, every one of them is going to perform a little bit different because every one who’s coming in found you differently and they have a different user intent. It’s also important, of course, to find out are they coming from the state that you’re targeting or country that you’re targeting? And if they’re not, again, tons of traffic may not be that important. It’s important to find out what’s going on with it and adjust accordingly. Thank you and have a good day.

Stuart Frazier: Welcome to Ask a Guru, I’m Stuart Frazier. I am the operations manager here at Masterlink. The question we have for you today comes from JT Smith and his questions is why are reviews important for my business?

The reviews he’s speaking about are the reviews you’ll find on Yelp, Epinions or Google maps. There are tons of other sites out there that do reviews, but these are the top three that you’ll find. A recent post from ClickZ.com actually stated that 82% of all purchasers purchase after they’ve gone online and researched what other people are saying about that particular product or service. That’s huge, that means 82% of people care less about that what the company is saying about their product or service and more about what other people are saying about their product or service. That’s one great reason you want to encourage your current customer base to go in and let people know how you’re doing as a company.

Another great reason is business intelligence, if you’ve got alerts that every time somebody posts a review and you find that you are constantly getting negative reviews, well guess what, that gives you a great insight into how people perceive your brand. If you’re getting negative results or negative comments, it gives you a place to start, to go in and figure out where the issues are that you really need to put some focus and to figure out why customers are having a bad interaction with your brand.

Another great reason is we’ve all searched on Google, Yahoo, or MSN, you go in and you put in a search term and a lot of times, for instance, if I was looking for a hairdresser in Dallas, and I type in Dallas hair dresser, I’m gonna get business listings. Well, those business listings, one of the ways those are ranked is by how credible they are. If you’ve got 30 reviews, verses 200 reviews, Google’s going to say, wow, this person with 200 reviews, absolutely! People are commenting on him, whether they’re good or bad, this is what people are looking for, so it improves your chances for getting higher up in the search engines within that six-pack. It’s funny, we had a 20 minute workshop where we invited people to come in and we showed them how to claim their business listing and get a review. We had one person who, let’s say he was with XYZ Mortgage, who claimed his business listing and one of his friends that was there actually was a client of his as well, and so his customer went on there and left a review and I think it went something like this, “Hey, used XYZ company and loved them; despite the fact that they were Aggies. Go Red Raiders!” Well they had a good time and they laughed about it and they left. Well a week later, XYZ Mortgage got a phone call from somebody who happened to cross that review and ended up refinancing a home worth $400,000, with them! Now, huge disclaimer: I don’t guarantee that that’s going to happen for each of you, if you go in there and start encouraging people to put reviews. But it’s a great example of “It doesn’t hurt”. What took this guy 20 minutes, the return on investment for that 20 minutes was HUGE! And so, the bottom line is, those are just three examples of why getting reviews is important for your business.

Hopefully JT that answered your question, let me know if you need me to expound on that and for the rest of you out there, if you are watching, we’d love to have questions from you and tune in next month for Ask a Guru.