David Leonhardt’s SEO Marketing Express

In addition to being a great website for networking and reputation management, LinkedIn can also serve as a valuable SEO asset. Your profile allows 3 links to your websites. Use them. A few tips for making your profile rank better within LinkedIn, and most likely with external search engines, too.

• Complete your profile to 100%
• Join some groups
• Build a large contact list
• Recommend your contacts
• Ask your friends to recommend you
• When commenting on blogs, make your LinkedIn profile sometimes the URL for your comment

This is also a great way to create a very credible page that will rank well for your name, including great positive recommendations in your favor. See more about this in my post on SEO tactics for reputation management.

You can view my profile at LinkedIn: David Leonhardt. Note, I am only connecting to people I actually know and have worked with.

A couple days ago I blogged about SEO for reputation management.  Today, as I was reading Kimberly Bock’s blog, I was reminded by her It All Comes Out In The Wash post of all the work that goes into protecting one’s reputation before it ever gets to the point where an SEO defense is needed. 

Reputation management starts with communicating your values and sticking to them.  It means being the reputation you want to have.  If you want to be seen as a square dealer, you have to be one.  If you want to be known for excellence, you better have excellence.  SEO is a protection against the odd fool who will strike as the good and the bad alike.

There is nothing more precious than your reputation. What happens when one jealous ex-lover, disgruntled employee or unsatisfied customer decides to get nasty and post something snarky on the Internet about you. And horror of horrors, it shows up #4 at Google or Yahoo when somebody searches for your name or your business name?
That’s when you need an SEO campaign for reputation management. While every campaign is unique, there are a few key steps you should take.

1. Make sure your own website comes up first.If you have more than one website, first and second is even better.
2. Maximize the reach of your website(s); optimize two pages on each to show up in the results.
3. Analyze those positive web pages already in the top 20 for your name and determine which ones could have an extra page optimized for your name.
4. Analyze which positive web pages already in the top 20 for your name and determine which ones could be pushed above any negative pages through changes to the pages or through link-building.
5. Analyze those neutral web pages already in the top 20 for your name and determine which ones could be made positive.
6. Analyze those negative web pages already in the top 20 for your name and determine which ones could be made positive.
7. Create, optimize and promote profile pages at popular user-generated content websites, such as Squidoo, MySpace and StumbleUpon.
8. Create blogs in your name. If your main SEO goal is how your name or business name comes up in the search engine, host your blog at BlogSpot and/or Wordpress.

Depending on your unique situation, there might be numerous other tactics you can use, as well. This list should help you get started if you want to do it yourself, or if you wish, we can help you with your online reputation management SEO campaign.

First, this post is not what you think it it.  By the way, just what do you think it is?

This post os about My Aunt Is Hot, a blog with a stated purpose to manage the reputation of the blogger’s family name.  It seems that his “aunt” stole his name (Ziering) and he wants it back: www.MyAuntIsHot.com - Because Ziering on Google doesn’t have to be porno.

It’s actually a story worth reading.  However, I did a Google search for Ziering and so far the aunt is still hot and the blog is not.  It looks like Mr Ziering could use a fair amount of SEO to reach his stated goals.  In the meantime, at least he is having fun with the concept…and I like that.

You might have noticed that we have a new page listed at the top called “blog advertising”.  Yes, we do accept advertising or sponsored posts, and we have set up very specific guidelines to avoid potential conflicts of interest, including transparency, relevance and freedom to say “this website simply does not deliver”.

In preparing to accept advertising, I did some research on what others are doing.  Tim Nash recently made a similar decision to mine, and given that he is a well-respected contributor at Webdigity, one of the more interesting forums around, I asked him if he would be willing to be a guest blogger and share his thoughts on paid blog posts.  What follows is his commentary…

I’m a blogger not a journalist!
 

Once upon a time I started a website it had a single page about me, these days I run several websites participate on 2 blogs regularly and guest blog on numerous others. I spend 60 hours a week working on the web one way or another. Why am I telling you this? Well in all those hours across all those sites I see reviews and I meet people and products and I think cool I will write about that, 90% of the time I don’t but occasionally I get beyond the first few lines. So when some one turns up and offers you a few dollars to write a review about their site or product are you going to say no?
 

I consider myself to be an ethical blogger in that I always declare when a post is paid for I only accept “jobs” where they are after my honest review. In many ways I consider myself simply being given a nudge out of the door of course I can already hear the screams from the anti paid per post lobby.
 

“The PayPerPost model brings up memories of payola in the music industry, something the FCC and state attorney generals are still trying to eliminate or control. Given the distributed and unlicensed nature of the blogosphere, controlling payoffs to bloggers will be exponentially more difficult.”
Tech Crunch - http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/12/the-payperpost-virus-spreads/
 

This is one of the biggest arguments against pay per post — are you being bribed and if so does it matter? If a journalist on a big paper was found to be on the pay of a company how would we react, outrage, anger certainly the end of their career, but why?
 

It’s down to trust and authority we believe our newspapers to be independent of such things this is of course not true but perception is everything. The journalist may never write a positive review about the company but we perceive our trust has been breached we have been let down.
 

But I’m a blogger! I write in my spare time and if some one says here some money to write about xxx then sure I will write about it. If you don’t like it don’t read it! The problem comes when the personal integrity of the blogger is breached which is summed up nicely by Stuntdubl
 

“If everybody writes positive reviews of CRAP - it’s a surefire way for the whole idea to suck. It’s not a surprise that people will accept money to write reviews or analysis - the big question will be HOW MUCH it costs for a review. “
Stuntdubl http://www.stuntdubl.com/2006/11/10/reviewme-2/
 

Here it is laid out on a plate If I accept $30 for an impartial review that’s cool what if I’m given $500 or $1000 can I really remain impartial when offered larger sums of money; I’ll let you know
 

Advice for Bloggers
So here some advice if you’re going to try Pay per post or similar.

• Set up a disclaimer page discuss which services you use
  
• Offer a way to view the site without PPP
  
• Make PPP very clear and obvious (I use the tag PPP plus disclaimer)
  
• Try to make your posts interesting and on topic, just because its paid for doesn’t mean it can’t be part of your normal blogging cycle.
  

A final cautioning word of warning, some search engines believe Paid links should not be allowed and to steps to prevent these links and pages appearing in the index  Grey Wolf has a great post on this; so is paid per post worth it?
http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/googles-policy-on-no-follow-and-reviews-is-hypocritical-and-wrong/
 

About Me
Tim Nash is a reputation management consultant, co-founder and primary consultant for Venture Skills, a “New media” IT company which specialises in search engine optimisation, reputation management, and technical side of online marketing. When not working at Venture Skills, posting site reviews on forums he can be found teaching at a local university where he lecturers in Search Engine Optimisation and Information Retrieval.
 

http://www.timnash.me.uk
http://ventureskills.wordpress.com
 

Yikes! It’s been two weeks since I posted SEO for Reputation Management: Part II.  So your patience has earned you a good post.

In SEO for Reputation Management: Part I, we made the strategic decisions of what Amanda wanted people toi see when they Search Google or Yahoo for her name.  In Part II, we took inventory of what is already on the Information Highway that she can use to that end.

Now it’s time to put together the plan. Time has slipped through my fingers, and Amanda (not her real name, remember?) has already begun implementing some of the plan.  At the end of this post, I’ll share with you her interim results.

I won’t go through all the details, but some of the major recommendations were…

1. Her blog was being used very, very sporadically.  More frequent posts, occasionally speaking in the third person, would help (I probably should mention that this is David Leonhardt’s blog in every post and put my name in the Blog Title above as Amanda does, but I never put together a reputation management plan for myself!).  In fact, I recommended a post about herself, something I should do one of these days, too. This should secure a second listing in Google’s top 10 for her blog.

2. She owns the domain of her name, but it points to her blog.  I recommended developing her domain to include certain content that would help her get double listings Google’s top 10 for her name.

3. I suggested ways to make her two blogger profiles work to her advantage.

4. I suggested ways to boost the rankings also of a few of the various places where she has articles right now (or then) on the Internet.

5. I suggested a few places where she could build a good reputation directly, that could also rank highly in the search engines or support the rankings of her other pages.  For instance, I pointed out my pages at MySpace, Zaadz, Squidoo, MyBlogLog and TagWorld.  I haven’t done near enough with any of these, mind you, but I will.  Honest.

6. I also recommended a multi-faceted linking campaign, geared to the various types of pages Amanda was trying to boost in the rankings.

SEO Reputation Management Plan Progress report.

On Google’s top 10 right now…

1.  Amanda’s Blogger profile.  She has another Blogger profile, but it has not been worked on yet and it is not ranking.

2. Her blog.  She has been doing more posts, but not yet what is needed for a second page to rank.  I have offered some additional details.

3. One of the pages I mentioned in item #4 above.

4. and 5. A new appearance by another offensive blogger, posted two years ago. How these two postings got up in the rankings is anybody’s guess, but it is likely the result of something that happened sitewide (as opposed to something related to these two specific posts).  As the linking campaign kicks in, the two offensive posts should sink.

6. Amanda’s MySpace profile.  More can be done to make this a double listing.  Possibly.

7. Amanda’s under construction and 99% unoptimized site on her own-name domain.  When the site is finished, there should be two pages from this domain in the top 10.

8. and 9. Two more of the pages I mentioned in item #4 above.

10. Amanda’s MySpace page. More can be done to make this a double listing.  Definitely.  I’ve made some additional suggestions.

So there you have it.  Some promising interim results.  One can do much to manage one’s reputation using sound, responsible SEO techniques.

We’ve been following Amanda and her quest to manage her online reputation when a potential client searches for her name.  We covered the first part of her strategy in SEO for Reputation Management: Part I.

Now it’s time for Amanda to take inventory.  She is actually in an enviable position.  She starts out with her own domain name, a blogspot.com blog with a blogger.com profile, contributions at a couple other group blogs, and several articles she has written (Amanda is a writer, remember?)

Remember that search engines will list one or two pages from any single domain, so to make sure the right information fills the first page (top 10 results), it requires at least five domains and at most 10.

In Amanda’s case, her domain points to her blog, so she is wasting an obvious opportunity.  If she develops her domain, she should be able to occupy two of the top spots for her name.  Her blog should be able to occupy two of the top spots and her blogger.com profile should be able to occupy just one. 

That leaves five more pages required, ideally her own writings or testimonials to her writing.  The problem with working to get some of Amanda’s best writing to the top of the rankings is that she cannot control the content or format of the pages…nor can she even be sure they will exist six month hence.

We identified those articles and group blog posts with the most likelihood of lasting, as well as a page where readers debated the merits of one of her articles, given that there is no better testimonial to the quality of a writer’s work than it’s ability to generate interest, even debate. 

Anyone whose business depends on trust and credibility needs to be concerned about reputation management.  Most people don’t give two thoughts to the search engines when they think of protecting or enhancing their good names.  But consider where you would go to check up on someone you plan to trust with a valuable project.  That’s right…Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN.

This SEO for reputation management blog series will interest you if you are… 

• an accountant   

• a lawyer   

• a therapist, naturopath or any other health service provider   

• and SEO specialist   

• a consultant of any kind   

• a personal trainer   

• a writer or editor   

• an artist of any kind   

• a web designer or programmer   

• a virtual assistant    

• a home inspector   

• anyone else in the service sector   

What do people find when they Google your name?  One writer (let’s call her “Amanda”) came to us because they found her blog in the top two spots, but in positions 3 and 4 they found a very disparaging blog post.  (Blogging is about being real; it does not have to be about being rude!)  

Obviously, she wanted to move that blog post down, out of Google’s top ten for her name.  That’s not how SEO works.  SEO is about moving a website up in the rankings, not down.  The only way to move a website out of Google’s top ten, is by moving ten web pages ahead of it into Google’s top ten.  We told Amanda that we could help restore her maligned reputation using SEO techniques.

We knew what Amanda did not want potential clients to see when they Googled her name. Amanda’s reputation management SEO campaign began by identifying what she did want them to see:   

• Her own website that lays out her credentials in a professional manner, so that potential clients see that they would be dealing with a professional in whom they can trust their project.   

• Samples of her work, so that potential clients see the quality of her work (easy for a writer, as well as for an artist; much harder for a medical practitioner or an accountant.   

• Testimonials.  Better yet, rave reviews.  Any third-party testaments to the quality of her work and her professionalism. 

 This is David Leonhardt, of The Happy Guy Marketing.