Marketing in the digital age evolves at breakneck speed, and 2011 was no different. So let’s review some of the big events and trends of the year before jumping headfirst into the inevitable social media marketing madness that awaits in 2012.

Google-Plus: The Arrival of Social Media Fatigue

By far and away the biggest story of the year was the launch of Google+, the search behemoth’s no-holds-barred attempt to go toe-to-toe with Facebook. Or, at least, it got the most headlines. Whether or not Google+ will actually matter in the long run depends on if it can back up all the initial buzz. Growth slowed considerably after a blistering start.

Part of this may be due to social media fatigue. The human brain only has so much bandwidth, and social media has not done much in the way of making the earth spin more slowly and add an hour or two to each day. And Silicon Valley seems to produce a new glittering social media tool once a week these days. If a new social media tool can’t quickly and clearly demonstrate how it will make life easier or better for folks, they’re likely to react by deleting the app, pulling out a hardcover book, and tune out the digital age until spring.

The Lesson? Don’t feel pressured to chase each and every “next big thing.” We can help you know when a social media marketing tool becomes worthwhile.

Still, Statistics Show That Social Media Marketing Matters

For example, Facebook topped 700 million users in 2011. Try to wrap your head around that for a bit. And it’s not showing any major signs of slowing down. In fact, if Google-Plus had any landscape-altering effect, it’s that it made Facebook better. A few years ago, Twitter’s emergence led Facebook to introduce the timeline feature. Google-Plus encouraged the site to vastly improve user controls and privacy issues.

The lesson? Social media is getting woven into more and more parts of our lives — especially Facebook — and it’s hard to see that ever changing. Your company’s potential customers and clients are all over social media sites like Facebook. We can help you connect with them.

Especially… “Location, Location, Location”

That social media still matters is especially true for location-based social media marketing, because it’s everything that the glittering, useless social tools that fail are not: It’s so intuitive. So life-enhancing. So easy. And such a natural utilization of the smartphone explosion. It helps you find businesses. It helps you review them. It helps you recommend the good ones to friends. It connects you with everything in your community that you need. Different social media marketing players are still scrambling to figure out how to best capitalize on these new possibilities, and it’s changing the way we think about SEO in Dallas, but the principle is only going to expand.

The Lesson? A mobile web design is an excellent (nay, critical) thing to have when location-based social media marketing leads customers to your business. Our Dallas mobile web design specialists can help.

Local search (the use of search engines to find local businesses) is changing the world—and it’s doing it just about as fast as we can keep up. Think about the all the different local search and social media applications that have taken off in just the past couple years:

Twitter, which now seems ubiquitous (and which spurred development of a slew similar realtime update technologies), truly exploded onto the scene just three years ago at the 2007 SXSW Festival in Austin. You can probably remember—clearly—the first time you dabbled with that impossibly addicting new phenomenon called “The Facebook.”

And, in 2009, Google’s integration of their Google Maps and Google Places applications into regular search results went mainstream, cementing local search as an indelible part of the interactive marketing landscape. Location based sevices (“check-in” apps) like Foursquare and Gowalla, and mobile, map-centric review sites like Yelp soon followed.

Match this with the enormous, meteoric rise of GPS-enabled smartphones and mobile web design, and you have yourself a ubiquitous industry that basically didn’t exist five years ago.

So what does the future hold for local search? And how—as a business—can you stay on the cutting edge of what can benefit your company, and not fall hopelessly behind your competitors?

Let’s take a look:

Stick to the Core

According to WHERE, Inc.:

Local (with a capital ‘L’) is a complex ecosystem with lots of fast moving and changing players – from consumers, merchants, ads, maps, LBS, rich media, daily deals, payment systems, social, local search engines, recommendation engines, big data, analytics, mobile, carriers, to OEMs — just to name a few.

Exhausted yet?

Don’t be. At its core, local search marketing is about connecting local merchants with customers. It makes it easy for them to find you, and easy for you (and your message) to reach them.

In the future, measure any investment of time, energy, or money against that basic core idea. Does a new local search app further your company’s ability to control your message and connect with potential customers? Don’t bother if it its ability to do exactly that is limited.

Don’t Worry About Early Adoption

Not knowing about the next big thing years before it actually becomes the next big thing (or collapses in a pile of hollow hype and spurned investors before doing so) is unlikely to put you at any significant disadvantage to your customers.

For example, even now, a small minority of Twitter users send out the vast majority of tweets (and the vast majority of those come from Kanye West). Early adoption of new technology is fun and a good way to stay on your toes, but hype will more often than not outpace its usefulness.

In the end, any new local search or social media app that succeeds will do so by making it as easy as possible for users to join at any time and reap some of the benefits. So there’s no real downside in just following the crowd — it probably won’t matter until there’s a crowd, anyway.

Embrace it. Enjoy it.

Interactive marketing and local search really is a wonderful, wide-eyed new world, with new opportunities to get ahead and reach potential customers and clients at every turn. So look at it as if you were actually coming face to face with a slew of new potential customers each day, no matter how they found their way to your business.

In other words, if local search—being where your customers are looking for you—is a chore, they’ll notice just as much as if you grimace when someone walked into your store. Instead, have fun with it. Look at every emerging new local search technology as a new way to meet and greet customers. Get creative with it (like McDonalds did with Foursquare, and Baskin Robbins did with Facebook).

Ask For Help

Still, the sheer volume of new apps and technologies each year can be pretty overwhelming — especially if you have better things to do with your time than chasing around Silicon Valley’s next sensation.

Here at Masterlink, we’re happy to be early adopter geeks. And we’re more than a little obsessed with not only tracking what’s rapidly gaining attention, but also anticipating how new technologies can best be utilized for small businesses. Give one of our Dallas local search marketing specialists a call. We’ll make it easy for you.

Let’s say you own an outsider art gallery in Dallas. Someone looking to learn about the genre would then quite obviously search for “outsider art gallery in Dallas” and get a bunch of results. But these days, search results don’t just include relevant, high-ranking websites. That same search will also bring up a Google map with locations of a pair of galleries, plus Google Places listings (including address and phone numbers for each).

That’s local search. And now with Google’s new blended results, including the marriage of local Places and organic results, make local search even more important.

It’s simply the way people use search engines (or applications like review sites, classified sites, or Internet yellow pages) to find local information. And more and more with each passing year, local search engine optimization matters to Dallas businesses—because the higher up in both the website and Google Places rankings your business climbs, the more business you’ll get.

Here are three more reasons why:

1. It’s the Info People Want

In other words, local search is how potential customers and clients are looking for you. So it’s a good idea to make your company easy to find.

At some point in the past decade, surfing the Internet became much less about exploring cyberspace and more about connecting people to the daily information and services they use and need. Suddenly, it made sense for a Dallas Limousine company, Dallas Catering service or auto body shop in Dallas to invest in a website (and now a Dallas local mobile website as well).

At Google, Bing, Yahoo, and just about anyone else involved with search, the core mission, of course, is to get folks the best, most relevant information they need — whether it’s a website, a dot on the map, phone numbers, pictures, or realtime updates about a subject. And as search capabilities develop, more and more people are going to expect to be able to find out all the information the need from the web—not just sports scores or news out of the White House.

2. Skyrocketing Smartphones

To truly understand the local search boom, look no further than the meteoric rise of smart phones. According to CNN, 2011 will see smart phones surpass regular computers as the way the majority of the world accesses the Internet.

So Internet access with people all the time, everywhere, is increasingly becoming the norm.

Here at Masterlink, we encourage all our friends and clients to invest in a mobile web site, in order to make it easy as possible for potential customers to access your page and get the essential info they need (contact info, driving directions, basic product descriptions and sales pitches, etc.). But smartphones effect local SEO as well.

Folks accessing the Internet on the fly from their phones are more likely to use applications like Google Maps or Yelp to figure out where to eat, shop, and play. We can help you develop a thorough presence on all of these sorts of mobile applications.

3. It’s Easy

All in all, getting your local business listed in all the important sites and indexes is easy. It’s just a matter of knowing which sites and technologies people are using to find businesses, and then diligently adding your site to each (we provided a list of local business sites a few weeks ago). And since it’s easy, you can bet that most of your competitors are doing it.
Of course, the other half of local SEO—stuff implemented in web content, web design, and a company blog—takes a concerted, on-going, comprehensive effort to come out ahead. And since new technologies and important websites are emerging all the time, it might be a good idea to let our team of Dallas local SEO experts handle most of the heavy lifting.

Next week, we’ll explore just a few of the basics behind how to do local search engine optimization well. In the meantime download and check out our How To Claim Your Google Places Listing (pdf).

Mobile web is a way of life, and even if you’re business is still thriving from within the same local shop on the same street corner where you’ve been operating for decades, showing up in all the major sites used by web surfers to find local businesses is critical.

In other words, even if you don’t sell a single thing on the web, customers are still trying to find you on the web—especially in this new smartphone era, when many customers want to be able to find you on the fly.

Driving directions. Contact info. Basic product and service info. Customers want to be able to find that, and they’re increasingly looking to sites like Google, Mapquest, and Facebook to find them. According to Web Pro News:

For the business owner, taking ownership of listings within these directories is crucial. As the owner you want to maintain accurate and complete information within you listings. You should also want to monitor via social location services who is checking into your place of business, what they are doing and what they are saying about you.

Finally, if you aren’t claiming your business listing chances are good that the crowd is adding your place to these directories and the chances are good that inaccurate or incomplete information is being shared to your potential customers.

So, in addition to a mobile-friendly website (discussed here), here are ten sites (plus a little bit of information that you need to know about them) that your business shouldn’t ignore:

1. Google — The king. Its maps, directories, business pages, and search engine are all integrated, making it the first place potential customers will look to find you.
2. Citysearch — One of the original online city guides (that could be credited with helping kill the need for phone books), so there’s still a big user base.
3. Mapquest — The original pioneer of online maps. Despite being owned by AOL, the site looked like it had been beaten for good when maps from Google and Bing rose to such prominence, but its recently made a resurgence thanks to effective smartphone compatibility and an embrace of open-source contributions.
4. Yelp — The leader in online reviews of local businesses. Users usually look here more to gauge the quality of your products and services than for driving directions and contact information (although, smartphones have made that utility increasingly useful as well).
5. Navteq — Provides GIS data to other applications, but offers its own GIS-updated map as well. While folks would normally first look to something like Navteq to see traffic reports, getting listed on the site’s own map is an easy way to grab their attention while they’re at it.
6. Where.com — A leading developer of mobile-based applications. It powers many of the location-based searches and applications used by your potential smartphone-toting customers. It also provides reviews, listings, and loads and loads of other data to potential customers.
7. GoWalla and…
8. Foursquare — Two competing pioneers in the location-based search game, both of which encourage your customers to “check in” on their smartphones and share where they are. It’s essentially free advertising for your business—if you make it easy for them to do it.
9. Truvo — Belgium-based local information and directory site, but its growing prominence across America makes it matter even in Dallas.
10. Facebook Places — Facebook’s introduction into the local search field is relatively new, but you can bet that they’ll be vying with Google for the lead in no time. Its Places function harnesses many of Facebook’s strengths—connectivity, communication, real-time information sharing—and makes them useful for both customers and local businesses.

Contact our Dallas social media marketing experts for help getting listed and carving out a robust presence on each of these sites. We can help you stay ahead of the curve.

It can almost feel like a hostage situation—for all the avalanche of marketing opportunities opened up by the Internet and social media these days, if a company doesn’t jump in the Internet marketing game, or does so poorly, they risk falling hopelessly behind. And for many companies, sitting out just isn’t an option.

And while, in the end, social media can make life easier and businesses more efficient, trying to stay up with the perpetually shifting Internet marketing landscape—new technology after new technology—is enough to make otherwise wildly competent business owners just throw up their hands and give up on the web altogether.

Blogger Fran Reed tells an illustrative story about what businesses of all sizes are facing these days in just the local search world alone:

“There were 70 organizations in attendance. When I asked how many of these organizations had verified their Google Place Page, only five raised their hands and the other 65 tilted their heads in a “What is he talking about?” fashion. This falls just below Google’s actual verified Place Page run rate of 10% of listings but it was the realization that most didn’t even know what I was talking about which was most shocking.

Now that they know, they are in for a real treat, right? They can now open the door to real local online marketing success, right? Let’s hope so, but now they are about to enter the world of “I thought this was just about verifying a place page?!” This world has a great lead-in with the promise of at least doing something in the local space online. Once you enter the doors, though, it starts to get pretty hairy pretty fast.

Imagine you go from “What is a place page?” to the following:

• Why don’t I have any reviews and how do I get them?
• Hey, I had all these reviews and now they are gone! How do I get them back?
• What is a Rich Snippet?
• What is hReview markup?
• What is Google Hotpot?
• Are Hotpot and Google Latitude the same thing? If not how so they work together (if at all)?
• Why do I keep getting multiple listings?
• Why do my competitors show up in the search results ahead of me when I have followed all the rules and they haven’t?
• Why isn’t there any real support from Google?
• What are Tags?
• What is Boost?

If it’s not completely dismaying, it might just seem a little bit silly. After all, half the stuff you NEED to know about today to maintain a social media marketing edge in Dallas might not exist in a year or two.

But Internet marketing does still matter—more and more with each passing year, in fact, as the skyrocketing rise of smartphones weaves the Internet into more and more parts of everyday life. Small businesses that use these tools at their disposal will notice the difference.

So a few a traits are important in order to thrive in this chaotic environment:

– A thorough understanding of the ins and outs of the ever-evolving Internet marketing landscape, an intuition about which direction trends are heading, and the ability to implement a new marketing effort on the cutting edge of the trends.

– The good old fashioned will (or should we call it ‘obsession’) to track this stuff on a day-to-day basis, and the wisdom to evaluate what’s important, what’s a waste of time, and what can make a small business shine.

– Just a little bit of joy about riding this wild, wonderful wave of opportunity and peril called the Internet.

At Masterlink, of course, our social media marketing specialists are a little bit obsessed with all this. And while it’s easy to maintain a basic Twitter feed or Facebook page, the time and energy required to truly make them matter to your bottom line could probably be better spent running the rest of your business.

After all, Internet marketing is our business—and our job is to make it easier for you to focus on yours. Contact our Dallas Internet marketing specialists for more information.

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.

Your customers and clients have great things to say about you—we think there’s little reason to be shy about making such praises known (and instead carefully work them into your web design as a way to build credibility and reassure potential clients and customers). Apparently, Google agrees.

According to Web Pro News:

Last month, Google announced that it is now using Rich Snippets for local search. Webmasters with pages that in some way pertain to real world places, can utilize these to reference those places and optimize for local search results.

As you may know, Google Place Pages contain links to reviews for businesses, and Mike Blumenthal has discovered an interesting nugget in Google’s Rich Snippets for Local Search FAQ that pertains to this. The tenth question is: “How will Google treat businesses posting testimonials with review mark up on their own site? Will these be treated as a review by the Place Page?”

Google’s answer to this is, “Testimonials will be treated as business reviews on the Place Page.”

Three lessons from this:

1. A testimonial page is an important part of web design, and can be a good way to reassure skeptical or nervous potential customers. The fact that such testimonials could now end up in Google search results only increases the incentive to accumulate and post them on your site. Let your satisfied customers and clients tell the world all about you.

2. Google Places continues to develop into another important Internet marketing opportunity. If you recall, Google Places gives you a chance to create a listings profile that will be integrated in various ways into different types of search results. For example, if you search via Google Maps for a business, the company info that comes connected to the dot that shows up on the map can come from a Places Page (including customer/client reviews). What’s on your Places Page might be the first thing searchers see when Googling your company’s name.

3. It highlights a potential problem that you might run into with some of your competitors—basically that testimonials could easily be faked.

As we mentioned a few months ago here on the Masterlink blog, the truth is hard to pin down on the Internet regarding online reputation management. As more and more people depend on the web for product and service reviews, more and more opportunities to exploit this dependency are popping up. Then again, as Web Pro News points out, there’s nothing that stops businesses from simply making up testimonials on their websites anyway. Google Places’ involvement might just make them more believable. It’s just something to watch out for.

Contact our Dallas web design experts for more information about an effective testimonials page, or our Internet marketing experts about setting up a Google Places page, or one of our online reputation management experts who can help you keep track of what the web is saying about you (in other words, we’re here for all of your needs). Oh and go give Masterlink Interactive a review while you’re online!

Just how many sesame seeds are needed for this sort of marketing McSuccess, anyway?

That’s the question execs were probably asking when McDonald’s started dabbling with a popular location-based search (LBS) app on World Foursquare Day last spring. McDonald’s social media marketing move was so successful that they increased foot traffic in their restaurants by almost 33 percent in a single day.

According to Mashable:

The company used 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards as checkin bait to lure in potential diners. The bait also worked to attract the media’s attention and resulted in more than 50 articles covering McDonald’s Foursquare special.

The campaign worked in both digital and real world capacities. Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants for the chance to win giftcards in exchange for checkins, and 600,000 online denizens opted to follow and fan the brand on social media sites.

“I was able to go to some of our marketing people — some of whom had never heard of Foursquare — and say, ‘Guess what. With this one little effort, we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores’,” Wion explained to conference attendees.

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, both Facebook and Google have no LBS services that could effectively swamp niche LBS apps like Foursquare and Gowalla. But the principles will remain the same, as will the marketing opportunities that will arise for social media-savvy businesses.

So let’s take a look at what McDonald’s did:

1. Took Foursquare seriously

In the big picture, apps like Foursquare are relatively obscure. But those that use them tend to be devoted advocates, and are also the sorts of “early adopters” who tend to be on the forefront of larger technological trends and developments. In other words, it’s a worthy group to impress. New apps are constantly emerging, meaning new opportunities to creatively capitalize on them will as well.

McDonald’s understood this, and was ready with a campaign when the opportunity arose.

2. Paid attention, and grabbed an opportunity

This specific opportunity came back in April, when the app decided to hold “World Foursquare Day” (a savvy marketing move in its own right—even if it does sound like an epic worldwide embrace of recess). It happened on April 16, or 4/4, or—get it?—4 squared, when a grassroots movement of users figured it’d be a fun way to promote usage of the startup all around the world.

McDonald’s was paying enough attention to see this event develop, and quickly came up with a way to join the fun.

3. Gave incentives for people to show up and share the good news

McDonald’s decided to offer Foursquare users who “checked in” at one of their restaurants—in other words, broadcast their location via Foursquare—a chance to win either $5 or $10 giftcards. This created incentive for people to come, and to tell everyone else that they were coming—all on a day when Foursquare was getting a bunch of attention, anyway. McDonald’s received the kind of publicity that would make the Hamburgler run and hide (plus even more from the news coverage of this successful, forward-looking campaign that followed). The company claims to have gained an additional 600,000 online followers and fans on various social media sites from the move.

All told, the chain said they spent around $1,000 on the giftcards. For a company with a multi-million dollar marketing budget, this is like a drop in the bucket.

These sorts of campaigns are cheap, fun, and easy to do. Contact our Dallas social media experts for more information.

Let’s say you’re out running errands in Dallas, and need to make a last minute stop for some, let’s say, size-15 stilettos — but you don’t know where to find a pair. The wonderful, magical world of local search already makes it easier than ever to find a shoe store: Search “Dallas shoe store” on your smart phone, and Google gives you an interactive map chickenpoxed with area shoe stores (including contact information).

But Google’s just taken local search a step further—bridging the web and local businesses together in a way where customers can now—at the push of a few buttons—find out if those shoe stores even have the Sasquatchian stilettos in stock… without ever setting foot in the store.

In other words, instead of local searching for a specific store, you local search for a specific product. Google shows you where to find it.

Cool? Information overload? The end of the Internet is near?

Google’s Paul Lee tells a story illustrating the company’s hope for the service:

One weekday evening a few weeks before our son was born, my wife commissioned me to find a box of raspberry red leaf tea for the delivery. I promptly drove to the nearest grocery store, which has an awe-inspiring wall of tea. After diligently scanning the wall and not finding the tea, I began to wonder if it even existed. Was the similarly-labeled raspberry tea the same thing? What about red leaf tea? Stumped, I pulled out my phone and looked up “raspberry red leaf tea” on Google. Beneath the “Shopping results,” I saw a red map marker for a nearby Vitamin Shoppe and a link, “In stock nearby,” next to a picture of Alvita Raspberry Red Leaf Tea. I hopped back in the car, and 15 minutes later had accomplished my mission. Two weeks later, my wife accomplished her much more important mission and we welcomed Benjamin, a healthy and happy baby boy, to our family.

To take part, your business would need to do a few things:

1. Make sure your business is listed and verified on Google Places.
2. Fill out a local shopping interest form.
3. Submit an “accurate and complete” data feed, including UPIs.
4. Wait for Google to accept your submission (they aren’t accepting every business right away, but are keeping submissions on file until they can).

It’s a natural progression considering Google’s aim to be able to provide searchers with any type of information needed at any time, and it should come in handy for local search-adept smartphone users. But like most new tech marvels that should ostensibly make life easier for everyone, it’s worth asking the question: is this good for your business?

There are a few obvious drawbacks: Fewer customers coming into a store means less opportunities for sales pitches and impulse buys. And less personal interaction with shoppers could make it more difficult to build lasting customer relationships.

But it could also help you reach potential customers who otherwise might not ever have reason to come into your store. And if your competition offers the service while you don’t, you could definitely miss out on local search-using customers.

Either way, it’s a development worth watching, and one more way that local search should be an important part of any company’s Internet marketing strategy.