Tag Archives: content

Online reputation management, , , , , , ,

Many people seeking online reputation repair hope for an instant, fast tool. For all the bells and whistles that can be promoted in this industry, here is what you need to know.

Content is the most important tool in online reputation management (ORM). It has remained so during all of Google’s many algorithm changes. The quality of material placed online, whether it is text, video or anything else, affects how Google evaluates its importance, credibility and relevancy.

Google is constantly refining and updating its algorithm, the system it uses to establish the credibility and value of a site over others. One reason is because so many efforts are continually made to game the system: to trick Google and other search engines into erroneously believing that fake content, fake websites and meaningless links (a search engine optimization, or SEO, tool) are credible and thus worth a high ranking.  A high ranking means a site is given more precedence over others. Many factors factor into it – some of which Google identifies and more it doesn’t.

Proactive Content, Strategically Placed, is a Key Strategy

Many damaged reputations result from not having erected a wall of proactive content that serves as a buffer to offset consumer-generated media (CGM). CGM includes the anonymous blog and forum comments that often form the most damaging threat to reputations. Proactive content counterbalance such sentiment, as well as negative online information that may be factual and from respected sources. When there is little content about an individual or organization online, on appropriate platforms and with the SEO that enriches it, anything that anyone posts online about that topic goes straight to the top of the list of results in a Google search—and can stay there.

Strategy Determines Best Type of Image for You or Your Organization

Effective content is information-rich text as well as videos, photographs, podcasts and any other form of information that can be placed online. Ineffective content has a junky or low-quality aspect. When you see meaningless text about an individual or organization plastered on numerous generic websites that lack a clear organizational unity or credible hosting site, you are seeing a generic ORM campaign that is mass-produced for hundreds or thousands of people and organizations. If you care about your or your organization’s image, it might not be an appropriate approach for you. What is important is intelligent, well-crafted text and other material that aptly reflects and adds value to your brand. 

To learn more, read: The Essentials: Online Reputation Management FAQs.

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , , , ,

“Content” is text, video, photographs, podcasts and any other form of information placed online.

It is the biggest influence on a webpage’s rank. Your webpage’s rank determines where it shows up in Internet searches of your and your organization’s name.

Ranking also determines the prominence of third-party content about you, which is a large part of the reason it is important to understand where that content is coming from. Understanding those sources will play a key role in deciding how to manage that content—which is the heart of online reputation management.

Generally, the sites with the most daily visitors and views have the highest rankings, and the most prominent content. Top 10 websites include Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as major media sites. But there are other factors that influence where a webpage shows up. Even obscure sources can show up in the first page of searches.

Strategically crafted headlines

People often see an article about them – or their brands — from a little-trafficked blog (or some other relatively obscure source) on the first page of a Google search. This can often be the result of the way the headline is written, making the article seem especially relevant to the search terms. The longer the article stays near the top of search results, the harder it is to dislodge.

Tags

If you notice pictures of you showing up prominently on Google, it is because someone has tagged them. A tag is a caption that is added to the metadata of a photograph or to an article, blog post or other piece of text that is published online.

Internet data scraping

Data scraping is how your home address, age, family members’ names and age and satellite pictures of your home end up online. Programs (called ’bots) continually scrape the web for data from publicly available sources like county courthouses, telephone directories and other sites. It is then collected by public databases that package, publish and sell that information.  If you find a lot of references to your address online, that is how it got there.

Aggregated content

Aggregated content means content that is republished from another source. The Internet is full of sites that republish content, especially content that will attract a lot of viewers, which includes celebrity- and VIP-related content. When you see versions of your photographs or other content about you on multiple minor sites (including sites that look junky or low-quality), they have aggregated that content.

Anonymous commentary

It is difficult to have anonymous comments about you removed from an online forum or other platform—but it can be done, especially if the material is clearly defamatory. Increasingly, websites are revising their comment and user policies to prevent libel. (The more obscure and independent a site, the less likely it is that they have such practices in place. See our safe browsing tips below.) If you are the topic of such content, look for their user policy. Often they will not only remove the offensive material when requested to do so, but they will block the user who posted it from their site.

Ultimately, you want to control as much of the online content about you and your organization as possible. The more high profile you are, the harder that is. But with strategic online reputation management, it is not impossible. Content drives Google results. It is now the most influential aspect of restructuring them. We are highly experienced in advising clients on what type of content to employ to reboot their Google results. We are experts in creating it, too. To learn more, please visit our Services page.

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , , , , ,
SEO: What You Need to Know

Search engine optimization is constantly evolving. For more than a decade SEO experts have been able to adapt many of their strategies in relation to the periodic changes that Google has made to its search algorithms. Now that one of Google’s major algorithms is transitioning to more continuous updates, SEO is becoming an even more fluid practice. With this shift, understanding both the core fundamentals and the latest factors involved in effective SEO will be more important than ever.

Google’s Webmaster Tools

With so many experts and firms out there offering a variety of services and advice, it’s easy to overlook the valuable resources that Google itself provides for free through its Webmaster Tools. It’s Webmaster Guidelines, for example, offer a concise overview of the fundamentals of SEO, dividing them into three key areas. The design and content section recommends creating “a useful, information-rich site” that has “a clear hierarchy and text links” and points to best practices for media content and rich snippets. The technical guidelines cover the basics of how Google “crawls” websites and the importance of the robots.txt file. Perhaps most important, though, are the quality guidelines, which, in addition to listing specific “illicit practices” to avoid, identifies four basic principles to follow:

  • Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
  • Don’t deceive your users.
  • Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
  • Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Planning for the future

Google’s latest algorithm updates are likely ushering in a new era of SEO. “The old linking tactics and the old junk content — they’re not part of a valuable strategy and won’t bring the results you are looking for,” Search Engine Land columnist Aaron Friedman warns. This will make the principles listed above even more vital, but fortunately they align quite nicely with good online reputation management practices. “Create good, high quality content,” Friedman recommends. “Earn relevant and solid links because of the incredible content you build.”

That echoes my own outlook back in 2012, when I wrote that “creating great content is the only long-term strategy for building page rank.” Content isn’t everything, of course. With developments like Google’s new “Mobile Friendly” ranking and the growing popularity of voice searches, user experience is also becoming a more important part of SEO—as is social media. Outdated practices will give way to these factors, but not much will change for those already employing smart ORM strategies and adhering to Google’s principles. SEO engineer Mike King put it best in a Search Engine Land post compiling experts’ predictions for 2015: “Great SEO is really no different than it was a few years ago. Terrible SEO is what’s changed drastically.”