Good SEO Is Reputation Management
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, October 4, 2009
I was asked the question, “Should I spend more time on SEO or reputation management? My response: Good SEO is reputation management.
Think about what the latter is. It’s using search engines, social media, and other online marketing tools to maintain a positive image of yourself and your business. If you do it right, you’ll build reputation management into everything you do. Search engine optimization included.
You can’t keep thinking either/or when you live in a both/and world. You will eventually come across a former employee or customer who had a bad enough experience that they want to tell the world about it. If you SEO your website and blog properly then you’ll make it more difficult for them to gain a foothold with your name. But what you need to think about is breadth instead of depth.
Most Internet marketers think in terms of ranking one website for as many keywords as possible. That’s good, but it’s elementary. The most important principle to understand about reputation management is that Google – by far, the most important search engine (though Bing is gaining some small traction) – will only rank one page per website per keyword. Reputation management by its nature a name-focused, brand-focused keyword strategy.
What I mean by that is you aren’t targeting generic keywords, but your name or brand name. That’s a very specific type of SEO. And since Google will only rank one page on your site for your name or brand name then you need more web properties – or at least more pages that target your name or brand name. Therefore, you should have several social media accounts that you remain active on as well as your primary website and a few other websites. In fact, you probably want to secure your name as an URL and make a portfolio site, or what I like to call a reputation management tool.
The time for thinking of SEO as just a way to target keywords is over. It’s time to start thinking of search engine optimization as a reputation management tool.
Pandia Search Engine News Weekend Wrap-up Oct 4 2009
Here are some of this week’s essential search engine headlines:
- Google Chrome OS Might Be Coming As Early As Next Month
Google might have chosen to debut its long-awaited Chrome OS as early as next month. (ISEdb Oct 2 2009)
- Porn Spammers Targets Holocaust Terms in Google
A Google Web Search Help thread reports that Google has been the target of spammers who are trying to push their pornographic videos into Google. (SE Roundtable Sep 30 2009)
- It’s Froogle, No It’s Google Products, No It’s Google Base, No It’s Google Merchant Center
The Google Merchant Center will replace Google Base for those who submit products through Google Base. (SE Roundtable Sep 30 2009)
- Google Broadening Wave Access With GMail-Like Rollout
Google will widen access to its innovative communications platform Wave, offering 100,000 new invitations to use the service (SE Land Sep 29 2009)
- Take That, Twitter: Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search
Twitter and real time search continues to attract buzz, and Google’s reacting by positioning its “Hot Trends” information in a place where more people will see it, within Google’s regular search results. (Danny Sullivan Sep 28 2009)
- Google Hot Trends Now in Google Search Results
Google has now made this tool more visible to the public by inserting it into the Google search results, when applicable. (SE Roundtable Sep 29 2009)
- 45% doesn’t know the difference between paid and organic
1500 respondents were questioned about these and other topics concerning search marketing in a research performed by dutch company First Focus and ValueWait. (SearchCowboys Sep 29 2009)
- Best Free Reference Web Sites 2009
This is an annual series initiated under the auspices of the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of ALA to recognize outstanding reference sites on the World Wide Web. (RUSA undated 2009)
- Microsoft Bing U.S. Search Share Falls, Sparking Google’s Gain
Microsoft Bing’s U.S. September search share fell to 8.5 percent from 9.6 percent in August (eWeek Oct 1 2009)
- Google’s Matt Cutts Calls for Disclosure in Tailored Advertising Report
Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. (Google Watch Sep 30 2009)
- Behold! A Search Engine for Flickr
Behold is a search engine for high-quality Flickr images. It aims to answer your queries based on what is inside the images — at the pixel level. (AltSearchEngines Sep 30 2009)
- FCC Takes a Stand on Net Neutrality, Opens Web Site
The White House blog in favor of network neutrality — “broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications.” (Researchbuzz Sep 28 2009)
- Google Says: This is Your LIFE!
The entire run of LIFE magazine — over 1800 issues from 1936 to 1972 — are now available on Google Books. (Researchbuzz Sep 28 2009)
- Gmail adds favicons to “enhanced” messages
Google has enabled what they call “enhanced content” in email messages — which comes in the form of a gadget that serves up additional information (rather than simply the static message you would find normally). (Garett Rogers Oct 3 2009)
- Augmented Google Earth Gets Real-Time People, Cars, Clouds
Researchers from Georgia Tech have devised methods to take real-time, real-world information and layer it onto Google Earth, adding dynamic information to the previously sterile Googlescape. (Popsci Sep 25 2009)
- Google Drops The Pirate Bay’s Home Page: Was It A Fake DMCA Request?
Pirate Bay was gone from Google results. Then they came back. (SE Land Oct 2 2009)
- Changes to website verification in Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Central: “We’ve also revamped the way we do verification by HTML file.” (Oct 1 2009)
- Now in Google Toolbar for Firefox: advanced in-page translation
Google Blog: With the new version of Google Toolbar, our advanced in-page translation also became available for Firefox, making it easy to read a webpage in another language (Oct 1 2009)
- Good things just got better at delicious
Search refinement and graphing – narrowing results by 1 day?! In some cases that might as well be a year! You can now narrow from the previous limit of 1 day, down to 5 minutes. (Delicious blog Sep 30 2009)
- Twitter to Introduce Lists Feature Soon
Twitter’s List feature will allow Twitter users to create useful lists of Twitter accounts in various categories such as a list for funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, celebrities and more. (SE Journal Oct 1 2009)
- MSN Debuts Online Health Service
MSN, Microsoft’s online portal, released a beta version of a service to let users manage their health information on the Web. (BoomTown Oct 1 2009)
- Google Offers One-Click Website Translation Tool
Have you ever wanted to have a blog in Italian but could not do it because you don’t know the language? (SE Journal Sep 30 2009)
This week we saw a lot of talk about Google Wave, as Google has invited some 100,000 to become beta testers. We presented Google Wave in May, and that post will give you the essentials.
It is basically a kind of advanced content and project management system, partly based on exisiting services like GMail and Google Docs