Masterlink Interactive Blog

Let’s say your suffer a blowout near Texarkana and need to find a tire store. A search engine could get you the urgent information you need…or it might just lead you to a website run by Texas senator and 2010 gubernatorial candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Search engine optimization went mainstream in Texas political discussion three weeks ago, when the Austin American-Statesman reported that the www.standbykay.com site run by the Hutchison campaign had more than 2,200 such computer-generated “Hidden Phrases” written into its source code, with the goal of boosting search results rankings for each of the dubious search terms.

This meant that both the expected (”Texas Republicans”), and the bizarre, but harmless (”Cooper Tire Texarkana,” “What is a keg?” and “Why do we have knees?”) would help you stand with the senator. Political comedian Bill Maher made his way in via four different spellings of his name. Ron Paul earned more than 120 mentions, including an eyebrow-raising “Bad Things about Ron Paul.” Incumbent governor Rick Perry was represented 148 times including, most scandalously, the search term “Rick Perry Gay.”

The Hutchison campaign denied knowledge and eventually severed ties with the consulting firm credited with what we in the interactive marketing community call “black hat” SEO strategy-gone-wrong. But the damage was done.

The Hutchison campaign took an egg to the face. Modern politics entered another new bizarro realm of controversy. And we learned a hefty reminder about the risk of black hat SEO techniques.

Why Black Hat?

The idea behind black hat is simple: boost search engine rankings by means that are frowned upon by the larger SEO community. In practice, this usually means techniques like:

• Invisible text: Hiding irrelevant keywords by, say, writing them in white text on white backgrounds.
• Stuffing keywords: Skipping any effort to seamlessly fit the keywords into the text, and instead inserting long lists of keywords without any relevant content.
• Doorway pages: Building fake pages filled with keywords that the site visitor never sees (but which search spiders do).

The Hutchison site stuffed keywords under an invisible CSS <div> tag “display: none.”

At Masterlink, of course, we do not condone the use of black hat SEO techniques for three main reasons:

1. It’s ethically questionable, and creates a user-unfriendly search environment.

Search engines are powering the information age, and we all depend on their accuracy. Imagine a search world where black hat techniques were allowed to spread unfettered. You’d search for information about local schools, and get listings for sites selling knockoff Gucci bags from Bangalore. You’d search for a tire store in an emergency, and learn about, well, a gubernatorial challenger.

This just isn’t the game we want to play. And it too often comes back to bite the website that tries it.

2. At best, it’s a risky strategy.

Even beyond the press and blogosphere backlash, Google got wind of the senator’s SEO shenanigans. The omnipotent engine eventually dropped the site from its search results.

Black hat often achieves its desired results, but only temporarily. It is in the search engines’ best interests to keep optimization a fair game, and sites unfairly gaining an advantage almost always eventually get caught.

3. Above all, it’s unnecessary.

MasterLink’s internet marketing methods have provided proven, safe, efficient results, without using such misleading techniques.

Stuart Frazier | Operations Manager for Masterlink Interactive

Having a landing page that sticks is imperative to online success. Your company’s landing page is the first thing visitors see when they come to your website, and it’s the only thing that determines whether they hit the back button or stay to learn more.

Let’s look at five ways that will help make your landing pages stick:

1. Highlight Keywords Earlier- If someone lands on your page after searching for “mortgage Texas,” make sure those keywords show up earlier in the copy. It’s pretty annoying when you visit a website and it takes 25 minutes just to find what you were originally searching for.
2. Have Congruent Images - Stock images that vaguely describe what you do are not going to boost conversions. Please do not put up a picture of 4 people that look like they are auditioning for next season’s Apprentice if you are selling landscaping services. Testing images to see which increases conversion is key.

3. Keep it Easy on the Eyes- This means leaving lots of white space, writing in bullet points, and putting key points in bold. Clutter on a landing page should be avoided at all costs.

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler” – Einstein

4. Make the Most of your Header- Your header is prime real estate. Design it to create an impression. Make sure it shows off the image that you wish to project to your prospects and clients. It doesn’t have to be magnificent, but it better look clean and professional!
5. Have a Clear Call to Action- The main point of having a landing page is to get your visitor to perform a certain action. In many business situations, you want the prospect to call you or submit information for follow-up. Make sure that your call to action is nice and clear.

Most importantly, be sure to regularly tweak and test your landing pages to find out what works best for your unique situation.

PS. Check out this landing page we designed for our client, TexasLending.com. and their free mortgage quote.

As more companies are increasingly using organic search marketing to promote their products and services, it can be more difficult to achieve the higher rankings for generic terms that everyone else in your industry is pursuing. While essentially any search engine ranking is achievable given the right amount of time, money and resources, you need to decide whether the additional effort involved is worth it, considering you can get overall better results from a campaign by making sure that a high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you have to offer.

A good way to accomplish this is by including keyword modifiers, or additional descriptive words, in the keyphrases that you target on your site. This helps to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is highly targeted, meaning they are looking for exactly what you are offering and are therefore much more likely to convert by making a purchase or filling out a form. By including descriptive words you are targeting what is called the “long tail” of search.

To illustrate this, suppose your web site sells cars, but specifically specializes in selling used cars to people in the Dallas Metroplex area who possibly have bad credit. Since we are selling cars we could definitely say that we want the site to rank for the most general keyword “cars”. But in doing so, we could be spending time on generating traffic that is not even interested in your site. For instance some visitors may have been looking to “rent luxury cars” or for a company that performs “repairs on import cars”. These visitors will go back to the search results to find what they were looking for. The time, money and effort spent on ranking your site for the keyword “cars” was not the wisest choice. The better strategy would have been to optimize for keyphrases like “buy used cars dallas” and “dallas bad credit car loans”, etc.

As you can see, the more words that searchers add to their query, the more qualified they become. Someone searching for “landscape” may be looking for landscape photos or for employment as a landscaper. The point is, it’s hard to tell. When they start adding words to their query they are coming closer to finding exactly what they want. In this scenario, when the searcher uses “Dallas residential landscape company”, we know that this person is actually looking for a company in Dallas that provides residential landscaping services. This searcher is decidedly more qualified as a potential landscape services client.

Finding keywords that are shown to have 5,000, or even 500 searches a day can feel like discovering gold. However, these “popular” search terms only account for less than 30% of total internet searches. The other 70% of searches are the “long tail” which consists of millions of unique searches that may only be searched for a few times in a day, but, when totaled, they make up the majority of the world’s searches in the search engines.

To make it even more interesting, 25% of Google’s total user queries are unique, meaning they have never been searched for before. Long tail searches are becoming more and more common; a recent report now shows that the average Google query consists of 4 words and not 3. That’s up for the first time ever as of Q4 2007, from the long-time 3 word per query Google user average.

So as searchers become more sophisticated in their search engine use by adding more words to their queries to find the most relative content, it enables us to target these long tail keyphrases to drive a higher percentage of targeted traffic to your site. Targeted traffic = qualified customers = more conversions.

As more companies are increasingly using organic search marketing to promote their products and services, it can be more difficult to achieve the higher rankings for generic terms that everyone else in your industry is pursuing. While essentially any search engine ranking is achievable given the right amount of time, money and resources, you need to decide whether the additional effort involved is worth it, considering you can get overall better results from a campaign by making sure that a high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you have to offer.

A good way to accomplish this is by including keyword modifiers, or additional descriptive words, in the keyphrases that you target on your site. This helps to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is highly targeted, meaning they are looking for exactly what you are offering and are therefore much more likely to convert by making a purchase or filling out a form. By including descriptive words you are targeting what is called the “long tail” of search.

To illustrate this, suppose your web site sells cars, but specifically specializes in selling used cars to people in the Dallas Metroplex area who possibly have bad credit. Since we are selling cars we could definitely say that we want the site to rank for the most general keyword “cars”. But in doing so, we could be spending time on generating traffic that is not even interested in your site. For instance some visitors may have been looking to “rent luxury cars” or for a company that performs “repairs on import cars”. These visitors will go back to the search results to find what they were looking for. The time, money and effort spent on ranking your site for the keyword “cars” was not the wisest choice. The better strategy would have been to optimize for keyphrases like “buy used cars dallas” and “dallas bad credit car loans”, etc.

As you can see, the more words that searchers add to their query, the more qualified they become. Someone searching for “landscape” may be looking for landscape photos or for employment as a landscaper. The point is, it’s hard to tell. When they start adding words to their query they are coming closer to finding exactly what they want. In this scenario, when the searcher uses “Dallas residential landscape company”, we know that this person is actually looking for a company in Dallas that provides residential landscaping services. This searcher is decidedly more qualified as a potential landscape services client.

Finding keywords that are shown to have 5,000, or even 500 searches a day can feel like discovering gold. However, these “popular” search terms only account for less than 30% of total internet searches. The other 70% of searches are the “long tail” which consists of millions of unique searches that may only be searched for a few times in a day, but, when totaled, they make up the majority of the world’s searches in the search engines.

To make it even more interesting, 25% of Google’s total user queries are unique, meaning they have never been searched for before. Long tail searches are becoming more and more common; a recent report now shows that the average Google query consists of 4 words and not 3. That’s up for the first time ever as of Q4 2007, from the long-time 3 word per query Google user average.

So as searchers become more sophisticated in their search engine use by adding more words to their queries to find the most relative content, it enables us to target these long tail keyphrases to drive a higher percentage of targeted traffic to your site. Targeted traffic = qualified customers = more conversions.