Masterlink Interactive Blog

Last week, we talked a bit about why your site visitors might not stick around long enough for you to make a sale and how to improve  high “bounce rates”. Cluttered design and navigation issues, poor website performance, and boring, muddled content can each send a site visitor packing.

But let’s say you’re consistently getting them to hang out a bit and listen to what you have to say—what’s next in making your web design affect your bottom line?

Here are three keys:

1. Content. Content. Content.
Yep, content is still king. SEO can grab a web visitor. Snazzy web designs can get them to click around a bit. But it’s content that sells, just like a salesperson greeting a customer in an actual store. In fact, this might be the only time a visitor takes the time to dive into the nitty gritty details of what’s written on your site, rather than just scanning and clicking around.

Beyond hooks and slogans, the key is to anticipate the visitor’s needs and desires in the content before they get there. Think about all the doubts and skepticism that a visitor brings with them to your site. Make them feel understood and reassured in a way that builds real trust. Back this up with accurate and expertise-driven detailed content about your products and services that builds a sense of respect and faith in what you’re selling, and you’ll be in good position to develop a deeper relationship.

2. Lights. Camera. Call to Action.
Some customers need a slight nudge. Others might just not know what to do next. Regardless, concise, clear call to action is critical element of your web design.

Many business owners seem to think that if a visitor likes their product or service, they’ll just sort of figure out what to do next. Don’t assume this. Give them a compelling, clear-cut offer, and then make it as easy as possible for them to take the plunge, in a step-by-step way. This includes:

• An attractive “Contact” page, featuring more than just a form. Give them email addresses. Give them phone numbers. Give them a Google map with all of your locations listed. Give them a name and a face for who they’d be talking to if they make the all.
• “Add to Cart” functions if you’re selling a product.
• Forms for quote requests.
• Clear information about pricing, packages, and product specs.
• Online chat with salespeople.
• Access to newsletters, blogs, and white papers.

3. Be Memorable

In the end, the time just won’t be right for many otherwise interested site visitors. But if you connect with visitors in a real way, make them feel understood and cared about, and make yourself stand out from the competition, you’ll be there in their memory when they’re ready to pull the trigger.

This is where a comprehensive web design matters most, with all the different elements working together. A visitor should leave your site impressed by your professionalism, expertise, personality, and the way you anticipated their needs and desires. Sacrifice any of these, and the experience won’t be so memorable.

Contact one of our Dallas web design experts to learn more about our approach to web design and creating compelling web content. We’re here for you if it’s time to rethink your web design.

Why Web Design Matters: Bounce Rates

A new web design is more than just a fresh coat of paint.

At Masterlink, our web designs are sleek, professional, pleasing to search engines, and welcoming to first-time visitors. But if they didn’t draw visitors further into your site (and ultimately effectively sell your products and services), the design would largely be a failure. What good is SEO-driven traffic, after all, if nobody sticks around long enough to see why you’re ranked so highly in the first place?

The way to track this is called a “bounce rate”—basically a measurement of what percentage of your website’s traffic quickly “bounces” away to other sites instead of sticking around and exploring other pages.

Here are three web design flaws that can create (or cure) bounce rate problems:

1. Navigation Confusion

There’s simply nothing more aggravating for a visitor than a confusing, disorganized website. More than likely, that visitor has come to your site seeking very specific information about your products and services. A poorly designed and unnavigable site structure will frustrate that process, and send the visitor packing.

If it takes more than a few seconds for a first-time visitor to find the information they need, it might be time to consider a redesign.

2. Plodding Performance

The web is a rapid-fire arena where holding someone’s attention for more than a few seconds can seem like a considerable feat. If your site is weighed down by heavy graphics and poor web design technique, it might load too slowly for visitors to stick around while the rest of the web is screaming for their attention.

We take website performance seriously, and employ an army of techniques to keep your site humming.

3. Colorless Content

Your business could offer exactly what a site visitor needs and desires. But if your content doesn’t effectively communicate as much, and successfully highlight what your company offers and how it stands out from the competition, the content fails. For more skeptical visitors, the content needs to be even more compelling.

This means content that leaps off the page, pulls visitors in, and whets their appetite for learning more. It may sound cliché, but content is very much king.

Contact one of our Dallas web design experts for more information. We’ll both design a site that boosts your business, and help you track your site’s performance with a full suite of analytics statistics.

Say it smart. Say it with heart. And say it in as many different ways as possible.

Some interesting stats were released this week from a new Nielsen Three Screen Report about how people are watching online video.

According to Web Pro News:

High-speed broadband access, now in 63.5 percent of homes, has created a better user experience for watching online videos and nearly a quarter of households have smartphones, allowing people to “place shift” and watch video anywhere.

Despite the common perception that viewers of videos on mobile phones are mostly teens, more than half (55%) are adults aged 25-49. While mobile online video viewing is still fairly limited, year over year growth is notable at 51.2%.

[…]Also in the first quarter 138 million people watched video on the Internet spending on average 3 hours, 10 minutes.

When it comes to mobile video, 20.3 million watched mobile video in the U.S., spending on average 3 hours and 37 minutes each month.

So online video is officially mainstream. How do these stats affect your web design and Internet marketing strategy?

Basically, it just means that there’s more and more reason to effectively integrate video into your comprehensive web presence. It can pay big dividends: Catchy content tends to get passed around. Shared links both spread your message and boost search engine rankings. Video platforms like YouTube give viewers the chance to respond and interact with your company. And with the rise of mobile video, these elements could be targeted in ways that will benefit users on-the-go, potentially giving your company a critical edge.

In other words, there are limitless ways now to creatively reach potential customers.

At Masterlink Interactive , we recommend a multi-faceted approach to Internet marketing and web design. All of our clients provide great products and services—our goal is just to help broadcast those impressive capabilities via as many different platforms as are needed to reach their potential customers. Different people will respond to different modes of communication, so it’s important to modify your message where possible.

Beyond video, this also means integrating elements into your web design like social media marketing, flash design, and e-mail marketing.

Contact our Dallas interactive marketing experts to learn more about video elements in web design and internet marketing.

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.

The iPad has arrived with gusto. It’s hardly the first, but it’s definitely not the last. This week Dell announced plans for their own tablet computer, following similar announcements by, well, just about every other tech company with an interest in staying competitive. Even money says another company or two or six reveals plans for a tablet next week.

So what does this mean for your Internet marketing strategy? Do you now need a regular site, a mobile site, and some weird tablet-oriented hybrid of both? Three sites?

According to R2Integrated:

Because the iPad is now a receiving device, count on the creation of an entire Internet-based or e-based advertising platform around it. This will usher in a new era of services offered by digital marketing companies, ad agencies, brand managers, and more, and you will actually witness a new advertising model evolving very quickly—not unlike the advertising paradigm that evolved on laptops with the first generation of Internet publishing.

Kikabink News points out that NPR and the Wall Street Journal already have iPad versions of their own sites. And ReadWriteWeb sums it with an almost grim take on the new Internet marketing reality:

Thanks to varying screen sizes and differing feature sets (most notably Apple’s refusal to allow Flash on their mobile devices), those who want to provide compelling content to all their site visitors will be forced to re-code their site multiple times. Publishers without the resources to do so will have to make a tough choice — remove the unsupported content and the media that makes it slow to load on mobile devices entirely? Or leave it be and risk losing their mobile audience instead? That’s a “Sophie’s Choice” no one wants to make. Unfortunately, in a down economy where money is tight, that may be just what happens.

So what’s next for Internet marketing — sites that are 3D compatible?

If your company is just starting to dip its toe into the Internet marketing game, and hasn’t even started thinking about a mobile-friendly site yet — take a deep breath. Look at the coming spread of iPads and other “tablets” as an opportunity — not a burden. Because while iPhone app makers are scrambling to redesign their apps specifically for the iPad—and while, yes, it might become advantageous to develop iPad-oriented versions of your company’s website—an iPad site isn’t something you’ll necessarily need right away.

Why? Let’s take a look at how iPads will probably be used:

They’re small, accesible and can operate easily on mobile 3G networks via the same operating system as the iPhone. This means they’ll likely be used similarly to smartphones, whose users are often seeking quick, easily accessible information on the fly like phone numbers and driving directions.

But iPads also feature bigger screens and touchscreen keyboards, meaning users are more likely to rely on them for more typical web browsing than they would a smartphone.

So build an easy-to-use mobile version with easy access to your more-developed regular site, and you’ll have something for both of the iPad’s primary uses. Worry about more iPad-specific tweaks when the industry that sprouts up around the new technology shakes out a bit.

For now, there are a few changes to be aware of. Take AdWords targeting, for example:

AdWords users who feel an urge to target iPad owners can now do so without reaching out to people carrying Android devices and iPhones, as well. Google’s added an option to its “networks and devices” screen that’ll allow advertisers to adopt a narrow focus.

A post on the Inside AdWords blog announced late yesterday, “[W]e feel confident adding the iPad to the list of mobile devices that you can target specifically. To do this, simply edit the ‘Devices’ section in your Campaign Settings, and select the iPad under ‘Advanced device and carrier options.’”

More research will show in time just how people are using the iPads, and the best methods for businesses to target them. Of course, we’ll keep you updated.

1. Block Writer’s Block — Captivating content is central to effective web design. But it’s also where most people find themselves stuck. There are two ways around this:

   

   • Start early, don’t expect perfection right away, and finish the content last. It’s a somewhat independent process, and shouldn’t need to hold up everything else. Content is also the easiest thing to change later on, even after a site’s launch. So don’t let your quest for those perfect words paralyze the rest of the project.
   • Outsource. It’s unreasonable to expect your staff, just because they know your business, to be great at writing about your business. We often trust the kind of content that works—catchy, compelling, communicative—to writers whose sole job it is to, well, write. While we understand that nobody can tell the story of your company better then you can, we also realize you are good at what you do and that may not be writing. Most interactive shops have staff who are there and ready to help you in this endeavor.
2. Define the Web Site’s Project’s Direction — Know what you want before jumping in feet first, and you’ll end up saving both time and money by avoiding work that wouldn’t end up in the final product anyway. In other words, don’t spend a month building a state-of-the-art barn when what your restaurant needs is a kitchen.This can be difficult, as often you won’t really know which design elements will work best for your site until you can see it all in one place. But we can help you out with our scope discovery — essentially a process that helps you nail down exactly what you want and need, without having to flesh out a bunch of misfit ideas.
3. Keep the Purpose Clear — When your project gets overwhelming or confusing, step back, take a deep breath, and ask yourself a question: what’s the point?What’s the purpose of your website? To gather information? To draw attention to a particular service or product? To create brand awareness? To get people to fill out forms? To spread a message?Obviously, many sites are going to serve multiple functions, but for most sites those should be working together to achieve some sort of singular bottom line. And what matters is a clear understanding of what those functions are, how they complement and build off each other, and how they fit into your overall business or organizational goals.So for every building block of the web design process — from pages to features to content — ask yourself how it fits into project’s larger goal. You’ll save time and money (and a whole lot of peace of mind).
4. Be Decisive — The web is still relatively knew, and so the jury is perpetually out on what works the best in web design. This can make it easy to drown in an inundation of advice and web design tips from friends, family and colleagues. Keep an open mind, learn unceasingly, and find an interactive marketing company you trust and whose advice and direction you are willing to take — but the call in the end is yours to make. Do so confidently, and your work will reflect it.

Herb's Paint & Body Mobile Web Site

So how can you capitalize on this inexorable trend? Check out the work we’re doing with our friends at Herb’s Paint and Body Shop — simply the best auto paint and body work you’ll find in Dallas.

Ok, so my SEO gurus are not going to like my title, but it’s true! Now don’t get me wrong, my SEO Specialists are the BEST and they do an excellent job of getting that wonderfully sought after target audience to your website. However, what happens when the user gets to your site? Is it easy to use? Is it compelling for the visitor? Does the web design look professional? Does it look trustworthy? Is it outdated?

A billboard or newspaper advertisement can be used to drive foot traffic to your brick and mortar store, but if the store is dirty, the merchandise is not properly organized and the service is poor, you will not make the sale. The same is true for your website – probably even more so! Whether you are selling a product or a service, your prospective online customer is going to make a judgment about your company before ever talking to a real live person or stepping into that million dollar office you occupy.

That old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression” was never more relevant than today. If that visitor to your site hits the dreaded “back” button before visiting anything more than your homepage (referred to as the bounce rate), you are dead in the water. They will not be coming back.

Now is a great time to take a retrospective look at your current site and see what can be done to catch those visitors that are coming to the site. Some great ideas for drawing those visitors in might be:

• Incorporate some interesting Flash animation to your site that also provides a valuable message to the user that will entice them to want to learn more. Don’t use movement just to see something move – your visitors do not want to be entertained.
• Prominently place a call to action on your homepage.
• Offer some type of online-only value to the visitor, a special coupon, discount, free evaluation, etc. Make sure this information is front and center when they come to your site.
• This may sound simple, but put your phone number and a contact us button on your homepage – users do not want to hunt for that information.
• The homepage should be clean and clutter-free – don’t have too many messages fighting for attention.
• Make sure the content is fresh and new – add a press release, new blog posting.
• Remove any annoying music, sound or auto-launching video.
• Employ a tagline that tells the user exactly what you do – no “cutesy” or “creative” taglines.
• If your site looks like it was designed more than 2 years ago – START OVER.

We have seen conversion rates as high as 30% on sites that are well designed with great SEO that really targets the correct visitor. Even if you are getting conversions with your current site, study your online statistics – you could be missing out on a lot of potential new business.