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.

From an SEO perspective, 2011 was filled with no shortage of tweaks, twists and turns. But a core tenant of our strategy for search engine optimization in Dallas is identifying sustainable long-term strategies that will withstand the whims of the major search engines and satisfy the search engines’ own goals and interests.

So as SEO continued to evolve at a torrid pace this year, one timeless trend continued to prove true: content is still king.

The goal of the search engines is to deliver the best, most relevant information possible every time someone goes looking for it. So no amount of SEO tricks can replace solid, relevant, compelling web content.  Here at Masterlink, we can help you make high-quality content a central feature of your websites (and mobile website) in two main ways:

Web Content

First and foremost, web content is one of the most valuable parts of your website. It’s your message. It’s your first impression. It’s the handshake of potential customers and clients who visit your site.

While there’s a relatively small amount of content on most websites — and therefore relatively few opportunities to seamlessly work in valuable keywords for SEO purposes — your core web content carries the most potential to leave a lasting impression. Memorable, high-quality sites are the ones that are visited widely and linked to on other sites. The search engines reward this.

Blogs

Search engines also love fresh content, and reward sites that find ways to continually add new (and valuable) content. After investing in finely tuned core web content, you probably won’t want to just redo it week after week for the sake of keeping it fresh. Instead, the best way to add regular injections of fresh, conversational content is a company blog.

Blogs are ideal for reaching out to customers and posting news updates or compelling information that doesn’t have a natural place anywhere else on the website. Comment sections give customers a chance to be heard. And, most importantly for SEO purposes, compelling, keyword-rich blog posts often get shared around on other sites. Links to your site are SEO gold.

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.

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.

Sure, some companies can poke the grizzly bear with a stick and get away with it, but would you take that risk?

According to The Atlantic:

The Los Angeles Times recently flagged a troublesome trend at Google News. After an abundance of glowing coverage about the California Central Basin’s new recycled water system started showing up in Google News, The Times found proof that the search giant had been duped by a site called News Hawks Review. Sam Allen (a human journalist) reported on Tuesday that Google News (a mixture of human and robot journalists) had included content produced by a corporate communications firm in their collection of news sites. Google promptly reacted by pulling the site out off of their list of trusted news sources.

The controversy in California boils down a simple judgement call, one that human journalists make countless times daily when sifting through press releases in their inboxes. To be included in Google’s list of news sources, all you have to do is ask. “If you’d like your news site or blog to be included in Google News, please send us the URL and we’ll be happy to review it,” reads the site’s help page for publisher. “Please note, however, that we can’t guarantee we’ll be able to include your site in Google News.

There’s a bit of an underdog story to this, but it’s not exactly uncommon.

Simply put, there’s a whole heckuva lot of companies trying to beat Google at their own game going on in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. In any industry, in fact, there are going to be people who try to game the system. Nix that — with any system that effects our lives (government, business, schools, religions, etc.), there are going to be people who try to bend the rules to their own benefit. This is a fact of life.

But ultimately these strategies are flimsy, temporary and potentially embarrassing for your company.

Google is one of the smartest, most innovative companies in the world, and it employs some of the smartest, most innovative engineers. And they’ve got a lot of money invested in making keeping their search results as relevant as possible to do the people doing the searching, and therefore “pure” of fakers, hucksters, and SEO shysters. The other search engines aren’t very different.

So, almost invariably, websites gaming the system get caught, pointed out and embarrassed in the media, and slapped down several pages of results. All the money invested in that unsustainable strategy is gone. Sure, it is probably satisfying to see a company get the best of a behemoth like Google, but in the end you probably won’t be left with much of an interactive marketing strategy.

That said, SEO still matters.

The search engines still look for very basic things. While some websites will be so heavily trafficked that they’ll just sort of magically appear at the top of the search rankings, most sites need to do at least a bit of work to make sure what Google really cares about — valuable content — gets their attention.

That’s where we come in. Smartly crafted, keyword-rich content. A compelling company blog. A committed social media marketing strategy. It all can make a big difference in your company’s bottom line.

On their blog this week, Bing explains why, more than anything else, the search engine loves them some savory, juicy, smoked hyperlinks:

You want links for a few reasons:

1. because they alert us to your website when its new, or to new content
2. because they are a vote of confidence in your site – quality websites tend to link to other quality websites
3. because those links can send you direct traffic
4. because over time, they can help establish a footprint that points to your authority on a topic (think guest blogging)

To understand why links matters, let’s review some SEO basics:

Search engine optimization, of course, is strategies for making your company’s website show up higher in search engine ranking. For example, let’s say you own a Dallas auto shop. When someone searches for “Dallas auto shop,” SEO can make help ensure that your shop — not the hundreds of other Dallas auto shops out there — is listed high up in the search rankings.

Got it?

Here’s how it works: Basically, all the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo scour the web, indexing the vast majority of sites out there. Their goal is to get searchers the best, most respected, most relevant search results possible, so searchers don’t have to waste time scrolling through several pages of search results to find the content they need.  Each search engine’s algorithm differs somewhat, but they’re all basically looking for the same handful of elements:

• Keywords — phrases like “Dallas home loans,” that tell the engines what the site is about.
• Fresh content — so the engines know that your site is active and engaged.
• Links — As Forrester mentioned, links act basically as votes of confidence in your site that the search engines tally. Earlier in this post, I linked to Bing’s post because I thought it was worthwhile to read. When someone links to your website, it similarly tells the search engines that your site is valuable content, and more worthy of a high-ranking results spot than, say, some spammer out there who just loads up his site with keywords instead of relevant content.

At Masterlink, our Dallas SEO specialists can help you build in-bound links to your site through multiple tools:

1. A compelling, engaging company blog

If you post compelling, informative information, it’s likely to get shared around the web. Blogs also add healthy heapings of fresh content, and act as fantastic platforms for engaging with your clients and customers.

2. A commitment to social media

At its core, social media’s mission is to make it easy to connect with other people and share interesting content with them. This applies for businesses as well.

3. A focused, adaptive SEO strategy

SEO is ever-evolving, and it takes some focus and effort to stay on the cutting edge. But on that edge, opportunities for link-building elements like press releases are continually opening and closing as the search engines tweak their algorithms.

Curious about exactly how much traffic high search engine rankings can drive to your site? To better understand why search engine optimization matters, let’s take a look how much traffic can be lost by doing it poorly.

A couple months ago, we talked about how “content farms” — websites like eHow.com that clog up the search results rankings with mass-produced, SEO-heavy articles — had caught the wrathful gaze of some of the search engines. In other words, if you build your entire interactive marketing strategy around gaming Google, you’re going to get burned.

Sure enough, Google wasn’t messing around. According to Forbes:

Here’s some plain, easy-to-understand proof that Google’s recent algorithm overhaul is doing exactly what it was meant to do: Traffic from the search engine to websites operated by content farms is way, way down.

The update, nicknamed Panda, was meant to prevent publishers that mass-produce shoddy, shallow articles from driving them to the top of Google search results using the tricks of search engine optimization (SEO). Sistrix, an SEO consultancy, has already determined that Panda stripped leading content farms of their high rankings in many keyword searches.

Statistics showed that Google-driven traffic for Demand’s sites had plummeted nearly 40 percent since the beginning of 2011, when the algorithm change kicked in. Answerbag.com led the way with an 80 percent drop in traffic. eHow.com lost nearly 29 percent of its traffic.

It’s an important lesson to learn about search engine optimization, and a guiding philosophy that our Dallas SEO specialists stick to here at Masterlink Interactive. Our approach to organic SEO is comprehensive, not gimmicky and vulnerable to devastating tweaks in search engine algorithms. We build websites that appeal to both site visitors and search engines — not just the latter, while effectively communicating your company’s strengths and capabilities to potential customers and clients.

Because the primary goal of all the search engines is to connect searchers with high quality websites and companies like your own. We just want to help you highlight what makes your company matter to your customers.

This includes elements like:

• An engaging, link-building company blog.

• Catchy, compelling web design and content that’s backed by thorough keyword research, and seamlessly integrates such keywords and phrases into the content.

• A commitment to local search optimization, and carving out a permanent presence in the spots (Google Maps and Places, Yelp, etc.) where potential smartphone-toting customers will look for you.

And since the ever-evolving ins and outs of search engine optimization still matter, we’ll track and make tweaks based on the day-to-day minutiae for you (let’s be honest—you probably have better things to do with your time).

So this is what happens when the main gatekeeper of the world’s information gets annoyed.

Google made a long-speculated major adjustment to their search algorithm—the way they calculate which websites get lucky enough to come up first from different search queries.

The search giant actually does this all the time, constantly making tweaks in order to (in the company’s words) “give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.”

The difference this time is that nearly 12 percent of all search queries will be effected by the change.

Think about that — of the billions and billions of Google searches made each and every day, an 11.8-percent swath (that adds up to, well, really high) now produce different search results than just last week.

The reason most likely stems from a mushrooming amount of engine-clogging “bad” content, most coming from what are nicknamed as “content farms”—sites like Demand Media and Huffington Post that dominate search results with thousands upon thousands of highly-optimized, questionable-quality articles (from sites like eHow.com). By at least one unique metric, the change works. Google just recently launched a “Personal Blocklist Chrome Extension” that allows web users to block unwanted search results, and the algorithm change has so far affected nearly 84 percent of the most-blocked sites.

According to CNN, the move has produce no shortage of hand-wringing from websites affected:

Many webmasters complained that traffic to their sites dropped dramatically overnight, and others expressed concern that they can’t adapt quickly enough to Google’s changes to its algorithm.

“Why is it that every single time the search engine result page starts to stabilize and sales return, Google has to throw a monkey wrench in the system again?” asked commenter backdraft7. “Hey Google, this is not fun anymore – YOU’RE KILLING OUR BUSINESSES!”

“My God. I just lost 40% of my traffic from Google today,” said commenter DickBaker. “Referrals from Yahoo, Bing, direct sources, and other sources are the same, but Google dropped like a rock.”

There are many legitimate ways content creators optimize their sites to rise to the top of Google’s results. But Google has been cracking down on what it regards as inappropriate attempts to do so: The company recently penalized Overstock.com and JC Penney in its search results after the companies were found to have set up fake websites that linked to their own, causing Google’s algorithm to rank them higher.

We’ve been talking about this a lot recently on the Masterlink blog. But the new confirmed Google algorithm change makes it worth driving the point home — fragile, gimmicky search engine optimization and Internet marketing strategies eventually fail more often than not, and aren’t worth the money you’d be investing in them.

Our more steady, comprehensive approach to SEO happens in two ways:

1. Because a high search engine ranking can, in fact, make a big difference for your bottom line, we’ll keep up with all the nips, tweaks, and changes in SEO. Your time is probably better spent running your core business than slavishly tracking the nitty gritty details of SEO.
2. We’ll employ a strategy that isn’t vulnerable to minor (yet devastating) Google tweaks. We’ll help you implement well-rounded SEO-boosting elements like a corporate blog. And we know which phrases and keywords searchers are looking for, and know how to fit them seamlessly into catchy, compelling content that highlights that valuable, customer-satisfying company you already run.

In other words, our SEO strategy is to highlight your top-notch products and services. Make sense?

Google values websites that customers value, and all these tweaks are really about is pushing the best, most valued websites and companies to the top of the search results, making it easy for potential clients and customers to find them.

Contact our teams of Dallas web design and SEO specialists for more information.

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.

Here’s a joke—how many copywriters does it take to maximize a website’s search engine optimization, SEO, search results, and Google search engine rankings without making site visitors flee, scram, and skedaddle far, far away to a more sane land?

We’ve all seen websites that—instead of smart, subtle web content that responds intuitively to customer desires, frustrations and needs—seem to be instead bluntly written by a robot flipping through a book full of SEO Mad Libs.

It’s actually a common criticism of those in the SEO game, and makes the industry an easy target for light-hearted ribbing (especially on meme-loving Twitter):

An SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor…

How many SEO copywriters does it take to change a lightbulb, light bulb, light, bulb, lamp, bulbs, flowers, flour…?

@hotdogsladies: That was cynical. I apologize, SEOs. apologies, apology, sorry, best apology, cheap apology

The basic idea of SEO, after all, is that the major search engines carefully scan web pages, and then plug what’s written in the web content into a logarithm aimed at returning the most accurate search results possible. In other words, the search engines try to match what’s on the site with the terms and keywords used by searchers.

Naturally, the strategy for some is simply to pack as many terms and keywords into their page as possible, without much concern for readability, functionality, or message efficacy.

This strategy, as you can imagine, can backfire. Because let’s face it—the job of your web content is to sell—to hook, inform, and encourage site visitors to become customers. So if the keyword-infused content is so cumbersome that—while effective at getting folks to come to your site—it muddles or undermines your message, it won’t be effective at getting visitors to do the things that actually matter to your bottom line.

At best, this sort of strategy will merely annoy visitors. At worst, it will scar your company’s reputation and keep visitors from returning in the future. And since the search engines greatly value the respectability of a website (measured by how many other sites out there are linking to it) — a site that no one else shares or recommends won’t earn a high search ranking anyway.

At Masterlink, we can provide content and web design that’s both compelling, effective, and SEO-friendly. We know which phrases and keywords searchers are looking for, but also know how to fit them seamlessly into content that connects with visitors and ultimately sells your products and services.

And while keywords and phrases matter, they’re only a small part of the comprehensive SEO strategy we employ for our clients. We also highly recommend SEO-boosting elements like a robust, compelling corporate blog.

Contact our Dallas SEO specialists for more information.