Inevitably in the lifespan of a business there is bound to be an unhappy customer or two.  In the current age of social media, an angry customer has a more powerful voice.  In fact, one disgruntled person can reek havoc on your businesses reputation.  Perhaps they leave a negative remark on an online review site, or a comment on a blog.  Or worse, your business receives bad press that gets picked up by several media outlets.  Before you know it, you could find that negative reviews dominate the first page of google search results when potential customers or clients search on your company name.

What to do?

Online reputation management ideally should be implemented long before there ever is a problem. But realistically, in most cases that isn’t the case and your company is faced with some cleaning up to do.

In my experience here are some effective measures you can take and tools you can use to help resurrect your businesses reputation.

1. Google Adwords – If you aren’t bidding on your company name, do so.  This will help to push the negative listings down a ways on the search results.  Your first goal is to get the offending site ‘below the fold’ on the first page of results and ranking for your company name in paid search can achieve that.

2. Build Your Social Identity – Create social profiles for your company name on websites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  All of these sites have authoritative domains and it should be very easy for you to rank for your company name with a well optimized profile on any of the three.  Seek out lesser known social networking sites as well and genuinely participate and build your profile.  Share with the public who you are, what you offer and the positives about your business.  Be open and engage.

3. Press Releases – Have your PR firm send out regular positive press releases that are optimized for your company name.  Bookmark the reviews in social bookmarking sites, share them on twitter, build a buzz around what your company is doing that is good and draw public attention to that.

4. Consider a sub-domain – If there is a section of your website that could warrant a subdomain – consider implementing that.  For example you might have a careers section on your site where you post open positions.  Have the section be careers.yourdomain.com.  It’s possible that the sub-domain could secure a position in the search results and further push the negative site down in the listings.

5. Link Build to positive mentions – Build links to any page that is talking about your company in a positive light.  This will help that page to gain authority and could potentially move the positive site up higher in the search results.

6. Monitor your company on Wikipedia – Wikipedia generally ranks highly for company names which is wonderful.  However anyone can make changes to a wikipedia entry.  You should constantly monitor yours by using a service like Wiki Alarm which will email you when the entry has been modified.

7. Get a Good SEO who understands ORM – An SEO can work together with your PR firm to do the tasks above for you, monitor social media and website mentions of your company and work continually to promote positive press about your business.

These are just a few suggestions for implementing an online reputation management campaign.  The main goal is to interact with the public, share positive information about your company, and create positive news and buzz.  The more quality information that is on the web, and the more accessible and responsive you are to your customers — the easier it will be to dominate the first page of search results with beneficial listings that present your company in a positive light.

Search Engine Marketing & Optimization – the gist of it

KEYWORD RESEARCH

Keywords are the backbone of SEO but should be used with care and always with the website visitor’s experience in mind.  The main purpose of the [slider title="keyword research"]New to keyword research?  Try Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or WebCEO.[/slider] is to determine what people actually type into the search engines and attempt to organically introduce the keyword phrases into your website content to complement these results.

In general, you just want to focus on a few keyword phrases per page – where they make sense in your content.  Don’t be overwhelmed by the list – but just keep it on hand to refer to when you are entering a new product, writing an article, submitting your website to a directory or any other number of content and link building activities you’ll engage in over time.

INTEGRATE KEYWORDS INTO EXISITING CONTENT
Title tags, Description tags, Alt tags on images and actual on page content.
Using the keyword research, you will want to review each page individually and incorporate keyword phrases where it makes sense.
Most importantly, make certain that title and description tags on each page are unique.  You do not want to duplicate this content on each page.

While crafting the title and description tags, keep in mind that often these are what show up in search engine results.  So consider how you can strategically utilize keywords while at the same time entice the click through from the person searching.
Here is an example of how you might optimize your Earring Page:

OTHER SEO SUGGESTIONS

Add a sitemap
Add a sitemap to the website and keep it updated so that as you add or remove products – Google and the other search engines will find them.
As a general rule you want to be sure that every page is within a couple of clicks from the homepage.  A sitemap can make that possible for important product pages that are buried deeper in the site.

Build your links
Search, scour and devour your niche!  Look for directories to submit your website to.  NOTE: Remember to use some keyword phrases in your links when you can.  For example a directory link could read like this: Gemstone Designs Handcrafted Jewelry
Try searching Google for things like ‘add craft link’ or ‘jewelry directory’ etcetera.
Never stop creating links to your website – it will be the deciding factor in how well your website ranks.
Write articles and submit them to article directories – make sure you link to your website at the bottom in an ‘author bio’.
Sign up for accounts with social networking websites like some of the following:

• Flickr
•  Squidoo
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Epinions
• Del.icio.us
• Tribe.net

Blog
One of the exciting things about your niche is that there is tremendous ‘social networking’ potential.  Other artisans may not be your most likely customers, but they may very well link to your website.
Get involved with them by starting a blog where you chat about anything relating to your art.  Show photos of your latest designs, link to other blogs and artists and rave about their work.
Provide some ‘how to’s’ for beginners and poise yourself as in industry expert.

Join Forums
Do a search for forums with other crafters, or anything that you are interested in.  Engage in conversations with people and utilize your profile ‘signature’ as a means to promote and link to your website.

Add your site to local listings:
Search on directories for your area’s local businesses and also consider submitting to:

• Yahoo Local
• Google Local
• Live Local
• Yelp

This should get you started :-)  Good luck! 

I have heard people say that reciprocal linking is no longer effective. While that is true to an extent, it is still fine to reciprocate links with sites that you feel an affinity with.

We have to look at it this way. The search engines job is to return relevant searches. They can’t achieve this if websites are succeeding in ‘fooling’ them that their site is more relevant for certain keyword terms then a site that truly is. If webmasters are reciprocating links with many sites, especially sites that aren’t relevant to their users — the links importance becomes muddy. So it makes sense that they will discount the links importance. It doesn’t mean they discount the links all together. The point is, reciprocate links selectively. Make sure it makes sense that you would link to that site and they would link to you from your visitors perspective.

The bottom line is, if it’s good for your visitor, by all means do it. Irregardless of what any search engine might think. In the end it is your visitors loyalty to your site that is going to make it successful.

Once you have established that a site is worthy of reciprocating links with or more poignantly cross promoting with,why not be innovative in your linking strategies. By innovative, I am not intimating that we engage in any kind of search engine trickery. We’re not talking about crazy four way linking schemes here…

What I am suggesting is that now that we understand the necessity of search engines placing less value on reciprocal linking – we shouldn’t make our legitimate, user worthy reciprocal links stand out in the same way reciprocal links typically do.

This requires some time and effort on the part of both webmasters — but good websites do require time and effort.

Talk with the webmaster — actually engage them in a conversation rather then sending them a spammy link request email. Review eachothers websites and look for areas that you feel confident that a mention of your site could blend in well in their content and at the same time benefit their visitors.

For example, if you sell website templates and they have a section of their site devoted to helping their visitors build a website – it would fit in nicely that they reccomend your website for as a resource for high quality templates. In turn, find a place on your site that you can recommend your partners site as a good resource for learning how to build a site.

Other ideas would be to write original, keyword rich articles for eachothers websites. Agree not to distribute the article in other places. This will provide each website with some new, unique content – something we all can use! Link to your site with anchor text from within the article instead of just in your bio at the end.

Be guest writers on eachothers blogs. Really go all out coming up with a blog entry that is link worthy and give it to the other webmaster. This may even get you some one way links! All webmasters and bloggers need good content that is not plastered in hundreds of other websites around the web. Give them a taste of what kind of entries you can come up with and they may welcome you to post any time you want.

These are three ideas for innovative reciprocal linking. They aren’t as easy as simply trading links at the bottom of your homepage or in your near useless directories… but the effort will pay off far more then traditional reciprocal linking ever could.

Here are some other articles you may find useful:

Developing a Reciprocal Link Strategy
Randfish on Reciprocal Linking
What Link Pages Should Look Like
Reciprocal Linking is Dead
Link Popularity

– LR

I’ve got mine!

See — you can actually get to any page on your site with either http://yourdomain.com/ or http://www.yourdomain.com. That’s two separate addresses and technically – search engines see that as two separate sites.

So there is potential here not just for duplicate content but also for page rank leaks… if you have inbound links to both addresses.

There is a really simple solution. You need to create a ‘mod_rewrite’ that redirects search engines, and users for that matter, from http:// to http://www. It’s easy to do, I’ll show you how.

Open up notepad and save the files as .htaccess (unless you already have that file in your root directory in which case add the following code to it).

Now paste the following code into it:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You need to replace ‘yourdomain’ with your own.

Save the file and upload it.

That’s it. Now any time someone arrives at http://yourdomain.com they will be redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com. It does it for all of your pages not just the homepage.

Cool huh?

Here’s a hint too… before you create the file, make sure you don’t have it already. It’s a hidden file so you won’t see it in your ftp like you do other files. I use ws_FTP and with this program there is a little spot under ‘MkDir’ that you can type in. You type -a there and it shows the hidden files.

I’m not super techy so I can’t tell you much more then that… but hopefully you can figure it out

Karma – It might seem kind of silly to think spirituality in terms of marketing and optimization, but I’m talking about the watered down version of karma and not its real spiritual meaning. Helping others and doing good can build a social network that can be mobilized when needed. With so much noise online, being a good citizen on the web can go a long way and bring many rewards.

That really renews the freshness and excitement of internet marketing in my mind. Thanks Steven!

1. If you are using Flash, make sure you have an HTML version of the same page available.  Also, block the flash version from spiders with a robots.txt file.  Now, call me a newbie but I wouldn’t have thought of the robots.txt file.  I’m happy to know that.

2. According to Vanessa Fox from the SiteMaps team – hyphens are better then underscores in page URL’s.

3. Don’t break up your content too much.  Longer more content filled pages are better for both the users and the spiders

4. More then once we’re advised that if we sell links, Google is likely to spot them and give them less importance.  I’m thinking we might do well to rethink our advertising pages and remove obvious text indicators.

Here’s how it works:

Type: (linkdomain:amazon.com.com linkdomain:bn.com) (-linkdomain:borders.com)

The SERP’s will show any sites that are linking to amazon and barnes and noble but NOT to borders. Now just replace the first links with your competitors site(s) and add your own link where borders is.

Let me know if it helps!