November 13, 2012

Your online brand matters more than you realize

Manage your online presence to cultivate a positive reputation

Target audience: Businesses, brands, marketing professionals, SEO specialists, agencies, general public.

What you say about yourself online and what others say about you online will affect your business’s bottom line. According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, an overall one-star increase or decrease on a review site can result in a 5 to 9 percent increase or decrease in sales. Similarly, a study by Edmunds.com discovered that auto dealerships with a 3.5 star rating or below get 30 percent fewer leads, said Brent Franson, vice president of sales at Reputation.com.

Two weeks ago I moderated a panel discussion for the Jewish Community Federation Business Leadership Council on building and protecting your online brand. Joining me and Franson on the panel were Shanee Ben-Zur, social media strategist and manager for NVIDIA, and Daniel Bernstein, product partnerships lead for Social/Google+ at Google. Continue reading →

November 6, 2012

Are you using updated keywords for your business?

Or, why your keywords suck and are outdated

You probably built your website years ago. You’ve probably never updated your CV, just added your latest jobs and clients to the top. Your corporate bio, what you do, your products and services were probably written back either when your company opened, when you ported your brochures to the web, or the last time you did a major revision. Like I said, probably years ago.

Why does this matter?

If you don’t add the exact, literal titles, subjects, hashtags, and keywords people are using to find you and your services, then you won’t be found at all

Language evolves very rapidly, and how it evolves has little or nothing to do with what you call yourself, how you describe your products and services, or the keywords you have locked and loaded into your tweets, your websites, your hashtags, your textual links, your Google AdWords contextual ad campaigns, your Facebook ad programs and Twitter promoted tweets.

If you don’t refer to your services in the same way that others do, you’ll be surprisingly invisible when it comes to your prospects finding you on the Internet. If you don’t add the exact, literal titles, subjects, hashtags, and keywords that people are using to find you and your valuable services, then you won’t be found at all. Continue reading →

September 26, 2012

Why you need to buy all your domain names now

If you’re interested in protecting and controlling your own online reputation, one of the easiest things in the world you can do is register as many domain names as are available and try to back-order all the rest.

Expensive? Don’t tell me how expensive that’ll be, because it’ll surely end up being a lot cheaper than options B, C, etc. — where option B is the thousands of dollars you’ll need to spend if someone else gets your domains first and is willing to sell them back to you and option C is when, instead of selling your domain name back to you, they create an attack site where mis-info is the special of the day.

Continue reading →

September 24, 2012

Win the online reputation land war

Online reputation management tries to replace negative results with positive & neutral entries

While I concur with Vizzini, the Sicilian from the movie The Princess Bride, that one should “never get involved in a land war in Asia,” sometimes there’s no escape — and taking on Google’s search index, algorithmic prowess, and the natural results of organic search itself is, indeed, akin to getting involved in a land war in Asia. Most folks know only of the fierce fighting associated with organic search engine optimization (SEO), a process by which we write copy, optimize architecture, use keywords, add hyperlinks, and interlink sites in order to associate a keyword phrase with our particular brand, product, service, and site; another, larger battle is online reputation management, or ORM. Continue reading →

September 17, 2012

5 tips for managing your community on Google Plus

How to get the most out of your G+ community

Guest post by Jen Lopez
SEOmoz

You know that having a Google Plus strategy is important and you may also know how you should optimize our brand page for SEO purposes, but have you begun to manage your Google Plus community? Lately the team at SEOmoz has been working hard on making sure that Google+ isn’t thought of as just a third sock but as an important part of our social and search strategy.

Today I want to show you five ways you can use Google+ to engage more with your community, all the while helping your site and brand page show up more in searches. Now, let’s walk through some of these tactics.

One thing to remember is that with any kind of social strategy, what works great for us may not be the best for you. So test things out and see if they work. Here are the tips!

Check your notifications and respond

1You probably want to slap me in the face right now, right? I mean come on, of course you check your notifications — but do you respond? Every single morning when I log into Google+ the very first thing I do is check notifications. I start with the oldest and work my way forward and I respond to as many of them as possible. Continue reading →

August 29, 2012

Remove those regrettable online reputation tattoos

The way you feel now about all those photos of you at the beach, in your suit, body-proud, tanned and drinking — liberation and joy — may end up making you feel completely different in your near future — trapped and ashamed. No matter how young you may be, reading these words, you need to start thinking long-game when it comes to your online reputation.

You’re at the mercy of the Panopticon: networked cameras are almost ubiquitous

Your online reputation on Google Search is a culmination of all your separate, discrete (or indiscreet) choices — sort of like tattoos — and it’s always easier to not get inked in the first place than it is live with the consequences or go through the pain and expense of having all of your tribal, prison, lower-back, ankle, neck, and face tattoos removed. Continue reading →