Masterlink Interactive Blog

Facts and strategies are cheap in the search engine optimization (SEO) world, as one day’s success-certified SEO formula is the next day’s waste of code.

Last week, we talked briefly about how Google’s increasing emphasis on local search could dramatically change SEO. Specifically, we showed how the page placement of local search results (the Google map, local listings and user-ratings) could sometimes push otherwise perfectly optimized websites further down in the search rankings. Worse page placement could equal less incentive to spend a bunch of time and energy getting such a page to the top.

Amazing how rapidly things can change.

SEO watchers around the web noticed this week that Google has already started experimenting with different page placements of local search results. According to Mike Blumenthal’s Understanding Google Maps & Local Search, some of the tinkerings include:

1) The Places listings are BIGGER and look like the organic results except they have a map pin.

2) As you scroll down the MAP scrolls with you. So even when you are at bottom of page in the organic listings the map moves down and shows on right.

3) ONLY 7 (purely) organic listings show and in this instance most are directories or assn. Only 2 are Dentists.

4) To get on the top TWO screens you need to be in local. Most of the organic are 2 screens BELOW the fold.

5) Reviews are more prominent

6) Link to Place Page is marked as such, instead of just “More Info” which means better branding and name recognition for Google Places

7) It’s pulling meta description from the site – just like organic.

PLUS it adds some snippets from reviews on the Place page. So best of both worlds and BIGGER!

Click to Enlarge

In this format, the best-optimized websites are back on top… at least, of course, until Google decides to experiment with placing the local search results in a different spot. Or perhaps mix in a variety of placements, based on the importance of local search to that particular query. Or at least until a new, innovative way of organizing and accessing information emerges.

Two points:

1. As always, fundamentals matter the most when it comes to SEO, and an effective, well-designed site that gets shared around by clients and customers will grab the attention of the search engines one way or another.

2. Even if Google and the other search engines tinker with the placement of local search results, don’t expect them to ever minimize the importance of local search. It’s here to stay, even if the algorithm and factors the search engines love most might change.

It’s something we’re watching very closely, because local search can have huge implications for your company’s Internet marketing strategy. Stay tuned…

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.

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.

Speed now matters in SEO, according to an announcement on the Google Webmaster Central Blog by by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team.  The search engine behemoth revealed that it will start factoring in website speed (how quickly a website responds to web requests) into its search results algorithm - a decision based on split seconds it thinks have no business being wasted.

Google recently added Site Performance and Page Speed suggestions in Google Webmaster Tools accounts and actually indicated it would start tinkering with the idea a of speed as a ranking factor last year, and soon realized they were onto something. According to Search Engine Land, Google sees this as a win for both its interests and those of the wider web.

In addition to the numerous studies over the years that show Internet users prefer fast pages, Singhal says Google ran its own testing on how users respond to page speed, including experiments on Google.com. Singhal and Cutts point to a June 2009 blog post on the Google Research Blog that talked about how Google purposely slowed down its search results to measure the impact on search behavior.

All other things being equal, more usage, as measured by number of searches, reflects more satisfied users. Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second!

“When we slow our own users down [on Google.com], we see less engagement,” Singhal says. “Users love fast sites. A faster web is a good thing all around.”

Speed makes for an interesting SEO factor, because it’s one of the few that directly rewards website performance (as opposed to design factors like site architecture and keywords). And it’s a reminder of what good search engines try to do: give searchers quick, accurate access to the best and most relevent information they’re looking for. Slow sites inhibit that goal.

So here’s a few tips for keeping your website humming:

1. Consider SEO ramifications before adding heavy, unnecessary features — especially if the benefits of such features are unproven (we think a sleek, uncluttered web design looks better, anyway).

2. Tinker with tools. Google has a bag full of tricks that can help “make the web faster” in addition to the specific page speed suggestions provided in Google Webmaster Tools.

3. Limit HTTP requests. According to the Yahoo Developer Network: “80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.”

Google recently announced another big change in how they will be presenting search results. They are extending their Personalized Search to everyone, this means all Google users, whether logged in or not, will start seeing personalized results.

Google explains Personalized Search:

For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

The customized search results are based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. And you can tell when customized results are being shown because a “View customizations” link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how Google customized your search results and also let you turn off the customization. But I’m guessing the average “Joe web surfer” won’t know about the personalizations or how to turn them off.

Previously Personalized Search was only provided to users who were logged into a Google account and had Web history enabled (Google has it turned on by default when creating a new account).  This caused some confusion with many of our Dallas SEO clients as they began to see their own site rankings fall in the search results pages for their major keywords. Clients would call in a panic about their rankings and I would explain about Personalized Search and most of the time the client was logged into Google and once they logged out their own site was back to ranking where they had previously seen it. Turns out these clients had been studying their competition’s websites for their main keywords and were not clicking on their own sites, so Google assumed they actually preferred the competitor’s sites over their own.

So what does this mean for SEO?

As WebProNews puts it:

Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.

Rest assured the internet marketing team at MasterLink is keeping abreast of the changes at Google. I don’t personally foresee this affecting the way we preform SEO, but may increase the need for social media marketing on sites like Facebook and Twitter to reach your targeted audience.

The biggest change I see happening is that focusing on keyword rankings to gauge a SEO campaign’s success will become completely irrelevant as everyone will be seeing different results for the exact same queries based on past browsing history (if they have not figured out how to turn it off). So, as always, but even more so now, we will focus on actual results that show a positive ROI to determine success. Is your site gaining traffic for your top keywords as well as long tail keyword phrases? Are you getting more conversions, sales, leads from your website? These are the types of statistics a results-orientated, ROI-focused SEO campaign should be tracking. SEO for rankings is dead!

Google Chrome, while still in beta, has been slowly finding its way onto increasingly larger percentages of existing computers. Google Wave has been released to developers and may practically re-invent the way we work on the internet. Twitter Search has forced Google’s hand into pushing for more real-time searches and the unveiling of Google Caffeine. Google OS has been announced for release in a couple years.

Bing has single-handedly saved Microsoft search from plunging into the depths of internet obscurity, while reversing the decreasing revenue trends that normally spell death for a search network. Microsoft has also pulled off a coup almost two years in the making by assuming the role of Yahoo’s search engine. Microsoft has issued a widespread beta release of their version of the Content Network.
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This winner-take-all chess match should also determine if the desktop machine will remain the preeminent computational workhouse with cloud-computing a serious option.

We get it guys. You’re two technology behemoths that are in a no-holds-barred, fight to the death to see who will define Web 3.0. Well that’s just it isn’t it? It won’t be Microsoft or Google that get to decide the internet’s advancement. The users get a seat at the big-kid table, too. If the user didn’t get the say, then Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter would have never entered our common geek vernacular.

Not a day goes by without the two juggernauts beating their chest about something or other. Meanwhile, they’re still behind in the real-time search field, and Facebook just got FriendFeed for their part. The last-time I checked Ask was still pretty competitive with Bing in search volume. Apple is quickly eating up the mobile devices department with its own iPhone. Firefox is making huge leaps and bounds in the browser wars.

It’s fun to watch while big companies go head-to-head. The only winner can be the consumer. Still, let’s not take our eyes off the ball, and remember what counts; the user.