Kady Bentley: Hey Everyone, my name is Kady and I’m one of the SEO and Social Media Specialists here at Masterlink Interactive, and today I’d like to discuss with you one of the questions that we’ve been discussing up here, that’s been fueling a lot of our conversations and that is why should a business be on Facebook? So, a few simple facts about Facebook, it is one of the largest social networking sites to this day on the internet. It has over 500 million active users, and roughly every month 700 million minutes are spent on Facebook by those users. Each user has roughly 130 friends, which means if your business is on Facebook and you have one friend, you could potentially reach out to 130 more people. That’s just a great way for you to advertise your business. Basically your advertising spreads like wildfire, your name is out there and you’ve not really had to do much work.

Facebook allows you promote your products, it allows you to advertise sales, promos, discounts, and it also helps boost your page rank. The reality is, if your customers are out on Facebook, then you need to be out there too. It’s the way that you’re going to draw people in, and it’s the new age way of advertising and doing business and it’s another tool to help build your business.

If you have any questions on how Facebook could help your business, feel free to give us a call. We’d be happy to discuss with you the potential options you might have or discuss other ways in which Facebook could build your business in a positive way. Please feel free to contact us at Masterlink, thank you!

New year. New possibilities. A fresh look for your company might just be a great way to start 2011 off on the right foot.

Let’s review for a bit what’s possible, what’s emerging, and what you should demand from your company’s web design:

Catchy, Competent Content and Design

We use flash animation to grab attention. We build attractive sites that accurately reflect your company’s capability, history, and service to society. We use compelling web content to inform visitors, pique their curiosity, pull them further into the site, answer their questions, and satisfy what it is they came to find. We design our sites to be intuitive and easily navigable, based on user-tested navigation patterns. And we employ a host of cutting-edge e-commerce applications that make it easy to get on with the actual business of doing business.

Cutting Edge SEO

Search engine optimization, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is the process of making a website rank high in the search results for certain relevant term. For example, if you own a auto body shop in Dallas, you’ll probably want to see your site at the top of the results page when someone searches for “Dallas auto body shop.” In other words, you’ll want to be there when customers come looking for you.

It’s a tricky process, however, because the big search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) are constantly tweaking their search algorithms to perfect their own functionality goals—and they’re not exactly eager to tell everyone what they change and when they do it.

The last thing most business owners we work with want to do is spend their days tracking these endless, minute changes and figuring out how to stay atop a search results page. But at Masterlink, we’re a little bit obsessed with it, because we understand just how important a healthy search ranking is for our clients. And we employ a multi-pronged approach to optimized web design, seamlessly integrating into our clients’ sites (and updating) all the elements that search engines love.

Mobile Websites

We talk about it all the time here on the Masterlink blog, but mobile websites simply matter. Increasingly. Smartphone usage has caught fire, and with each passing year, more and more people expect to be able to surf the web and find the information they need (from companies like yours) while out and about.

At Masterlink, we design mobile versions of websites that are uniquely tailored to the needs and expectations of smartphone users—and these days, we offer iPad and tablet-friendly web designs as well.  This means simplified sites featuring larger text, fewer graphics, easy access to information like phone numbers, maps, and driving directions, and easy opt-outs to the regular, more detailed sites. And we design these sites without sacrificing your company’s well-crafted marketing angles that shrewdly pull visitors further into your site.

Check out our online web design portfolio, or contact our Dallas web design gurus for more information. Let’s make it a great year.

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.

Another week, another glitzy new Google innovation that could change everything we think we know about search engine and Internet marketing (okay maybe not—but it will at least make it all a little bit faster).

Google Instant is very much like it sounds—as soon as you begin typing in a search term, Google gives you instant results.

For example, if you’re searching for “Thai food in Dallas,” you’ll get an instant set of search results with every letter. “T” brings you “Target”. “TH” brings you “Thesaurus.” “Tha” brings you “Thank Me Later” (a hip hop album by Drake). Google finally guesses right at “Thai food in Da”—much to the lament of curry cravers in Danville, California.

The results are ready and waiting, maps for local search queries included—no need to even press “search.” The company thinks Instant can save two to five seconds per search.

Google Instant Results (Click to Enlarge)

Why? According to Google:

Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

[...] You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

The immediate benefits are pretty straightforward:

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

In other words, it’s not just a faster Google (because how important are those two to five seconds to normal people, anyway?). It’s a better Google—one that makes finding the information you need just a little bit easier.

So what does this mean for your Internet marketing strategy? Depends on how you look at it. Here are few facts, ideas, and theories:

• Better searching benefits everyone, and will contribute to the continued march toward the integration of search engines into every part of life where accessing information helps.
• Instant is not yet available on mobile searches, but the company plans to release a mobile version soon.
• It’s easy to turn off if you find it annoying just by clicking the link next to the search box.
• Some experts think it makes SEO irrelevant. Others disagree.
• It could have an effect on Adwords. According to the company:

“ Google Instant changes the way we think about impressions. With Google Instant, an impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds.

It’s possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels. However, Google Instant may ultimately improve the quality of your clicks since it helps users type queries that more directly connect them with the answers they need.”

We’ll keep you updated as the the effects of Google Instant begin to play out. In the meantime, just continue to work on your overall search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, explore the benefits and possibilities of local search, and make sure your web site design is mobile-friendly and in position to capitalize on the burgeoning utility of local search.

Search engine optimization around location increasingly matters. Here’s what you need to know:

What is it?

It’s optimization for searches that take into account location—of both the searcher and the local business—as well as other, more traditional searching factors. According to Google, 73 percent of all online activity relates to local content. Each of the major search engines now routinely mix local elements in with regular search results.

What’s led to its development?

The rise of smartphones and mobile web usage. The growing integration of web-usage into all areas of life and business. The demands of a more web-savvy public.

But also just the basic mission of the search engines: as we talk about often at Masterlink, their primary goal to get you the best, most accurate, most valued-by-the-wider-web-community information possible at any specific place or time. And if such best possible information can be tailored to your current location, then they’re going to try to get you that as well.

How does it work?

So let’s say while out on the town you get an urgent craving to slurp down some spicy green curry—Google is waiting, wok in hand. Search for “Thai food in Dallas,” and you get a result that looks something like this:

Boom: Directions. Prices. Reviews. Phone numbers. Links to websites and access to menus. Everything a customer could want short of a ticket to Bangkok.

But even if your office location doesn’t really matter — say, you’re a Dallas web design and Internet marketing company working for small businesses all across the city as well as nationally — location SEO still matters. Why? Trust. Familiarity. Community pride. The fundamentals of good business are still, well, fundamental. And customers and clients will still value the ability to meet you in a concrete location and build that business relationship.

How does it change SEO?

Look back at that Thai food listings. Let’s say you owned a local tom yum shop, and had worked really hard over the past year to get your site listed at the top of the search rankings. Suddenly, with the local business results occupying the top of the page, your well-respected, well-linked, well-optimized site might find itself in the middle of bottom of the page.

Furthermore, users are increasingly likely to look for more narrow results when it comes to location searches. So instead of “Thai Food in Dallas,” check out “Thai food in Plano.” The results change. A site perfectly optimized for a larger, more competitive area might get missed by more specific searches.

What can I do?

We’ll talk more extensively about this in the coming weeks. But here are some basics:

1. Register

The obvious first step is to register your business (even if you don’t yet have a website) with mainstream search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Also make sure your business is listed on directories like Yelp and Citysearch, plus more traditional paid listings like Superpages.com and Yellowpages.com.

2. Spread the (Your Own) Good News
After registering, ask your best clients to write reviews. Ratings and reviews are one of the first factors clicked on by searchers.

3. Experiment. Have Fun With It. Just Don’t Forget About SEO Basics.
Since location searching is still relatively new, there’s plenty of space for exploration about what boosts rankings. But the game hasn’t completely started over, and all the standard elements that search engines love still matter the most. The location-specific elements are just a new twist on an ever evolving marketing arena.

Here’s your new search engine optimization strategy:

1. Build a company that is valued by your customers and clients.
2. Build a smart, effective site that highlights this value.
3. Build a company that is valued by your customers and clients.
4. No, really, build a great company.

Here’s why:

A few weeks ago, we mentioned that Google had made a small tweak in the search algorithm, referred to as “Mayday”, and that such tiny changes in the formula could mean significant drops in search engine rankings for companies that focus more site optimization than on what the site actually offers to customers and clients.

Apparently, it happened as expected.

According to Web Pro News:

Google’s recent algorithm update, nicknamed “Mayday” by webmasters got a lot of people riled up, as many claimed it seriously affected their rankings, and potentially their revenues.

[…] Here are a few samples of reader comments from our previous coverage of the update:

“In conjunction with the drop in Google traffic, I have seen a matching drop in clicks out from my site to other sites. So it’s real, and it’s not been rosy to deal with.”

“Every time they make an improvement something else goes wrong.”

“Yes I have worked hard trying to rank and it keeps changing. Decided to go to other methods and forget about Google and their ranking.”

[...] One reader offered some sound advice:

“Never forget the first rules in SEO: It changes all the time. So, Google has made a change, which is not the first one. Do the basics right and you will have a sound long-term strategy.”

In an interview with the site, Google SEO liaison Matt Cutts says: “We’re trying to spot what are the signals of quality, whether for pages or for sites, that really are going to be good for users. [...] So part of what ‘Mayday’ addresses is trying to say ‘How do we return the best sites—the sites we think users are going to like?’”

We agree, and say as much often here at Masterlink Interactive: Focusing your web site’s SEO too much on a single, specific search ranking factor leaves you vulnerable to the whims and business interests of the search engines themselves. Quality sites that visitors love will thrive in a rapidly changing search environment.

This doesn’t mean that understanding the more complicated ins and outs of SEO isn’t important. Quite the contrary—the right tweaks can mean the difference between first page and third. SEO is constantly evolving, and someone (like us!) a little bit obsessed with following and figuring out the industry can benefit your company in a big way.

But web design quality is primary, and a site built solely to please the search engines is bound to fall whenever their algorithms get tweaked. We help you build sites that your customers and clients value, and it’s that element that the search engines are working endlessly to make sure matters most.

Contact us to develop a customized web design, search engine optimization, and comprehensive Internet marketing strategy.

If you noticed a slight change in your Google-driven traffic this past week, it may be due to a small tweak the search engine made in its algorithm — one that brings up an excellent point about web design and Internet marketing.

According to SearchEngineLand:

Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks. These frequent changes are one reason Google itself downplays algorithm updates. Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.

However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”.

[...] This change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic.

This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with “item” pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them. For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database.

Our favorite Google webmaster Matt Cutts posted a YouTube explanation of the tweak as well, describing it as “…an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long tail queries.” Cutts calls the change a “quality win,” and the goal, he says, should search relevancy, not search rankings.

They both highlight an important guiding philosophy about web design: obsessing and designing your site around a single, specific search ranking factor leaves you vulnerable to the whims and business interests of the search engines themselves.

Google’s goal is to get searchers the best, most accurate, most valued-by-the-wider-web-community information possible, and is constantly tweaking its search algorithm to weed out any emerging SEO gimmicks that undermine that aim.

So let’s say you own a Yamaha Mortorcycle parts shop in Dallas. You can’t just put “Yamaha Mortorcycle parts shop in Dallas” a thousand times on your site and hope to come out on top. Google values more than just keyword volume. They want the companies at the top of their rankings to be valued in their communities (and to have websites that reflect as much).

Similarly, our SEO goal isn’t to artificially boost your company’s presence on the web. It’s to help you highlight and draw attention to the excellent services you already provide.

So from your initial web design to the implementation of your on-going Internet marketing strategy, we take a more nuanced, comprehensive approach to interactive marketing and SEO.

This means aspects like:

• First and foremost, a quality, adaptable, customizable web design (view our web design portfolio here).
• A content management system supported by our Dallas staff that allows site owners to quickly and easily make changes.
• A MarketMaster™ interactive marketing plan that maximizes results by anticipating and meeting your unique needs.
• A social media marketing plan that both engages your customers and site visitors in a meaningful way, and boosts SEO via link building.
• An Internet marketing strategy built around social media marketing, pay-per-click services, online reputation management, email marketing, blogging, link building, conversion optimization and web analytics services.

Think of it like a school lunch cafeteria. If you fill up all the kids on cake first, you can’t expect them to stick around for the green bean casserole.

In other words, order matters when it comes to web design and search engine optimization (SEO). As you probably know about SEO, both what you see on the page and what is going on behind the scenes in the source code matter.

On the page, the place where you’ll usually have the most important keywords and anchor text links is in the main body content. In otherwords, that catchy content just below the logos, headlines, and navigation bars that reaches out and pulls visitors further in. It’s there that it’s easiest to creatively and seamlessly target your site around specific keywords and phrases as part of an overall, comprehensive Internet marketing strategy.

In SEO, remember these two basic rules:

Rule No. 1: Higher on the page in the source code is better for stuff that you want Google to notice. Search engines will eat whatever is put in front of them first.

Rule No. 2: If a web page has two links that take you to the same page, only the anchor text (an important signal for search engines) of the first (highest in code) link will be counted.

Here’s why this matters:

Let’s say you run a auto body shop in Dallas. In your site’s body content, you put in an anchor text link for “Dallas auto body repair” (the term for which you expect most potential customers to search) which, if clicked, takes the visitor to your “services” page. It fits your content, and it’s more specific than a more generic search term like, well, “services.” But since there’s already a link in your navigation bar (and therefore higher up in the code) to the “services” page, the “Dallas auto body repair” link won’t get counted by Google. That smart, well-researched search term (“Dallas auto body repair” ) won’t help your SEO as much as it could.

Make sense?

The typical code order for a basic four-section page goes like this:

1. Top bar (navigation, logos)
2. Side bar (links, more navigation)
3. Main body content (catchy, keyword-heavy content and anchor text links)
4. Footer (more navigation)

So in theory, if you flip the main body content and the top bar, you avoid these link conflicts. Google will index your more descriptive, more tailored links from the body content. Similarly, by paying attention to code order in your web design process, you can better control which links on different sidebars will be indexed first.

It sounds simple, but it can amount to a fairly significant overhaul of your site’s code, so the best time to do it is during a major site website redesign, or during the initial development of your website.

Contact us about coding options or a more detailed explanation about how to do this with our expert Dallas website designers. In a competitive SEO market like Dallas, every little bit can help your business stand out.

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.