Just getting it out there – this isn’t a product review. It’s an article on understanding  how to take advantage of Net Promoter Score or NPS using Qeryz – a free customer feedback survey tool. Basically speaking, ORM or Online Reputation Management is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Depending on how you handle your ORM, it can either make or break your SEO so it is recommended to understand it.

Many people who do their business primarily online wonder what it would take to get people to take action. Such actions could be buying their products or at the very least inquire about their services. In SEO, creating content is the key to ranking well on search engines such as Google or Bing.

However, copywriting itself must suit the needs or wants of the people who visit the website itself. In other words, the intricacies of online marketing should lead to one thing and that is more natural and fuller content. Knowing what to write or provide in your website in order to get people to take action, however, is an entirely different problem.

Getting to know your Visitors

One of the primary purposes of copywriting is getting people to take a desirable action with regards to your website. That could be anything from subscribing to your posts or even availing of one of your premium services. The possibilities are endless and the only variables are what kind of services you offer and what you want your website’s visitors to do for you.

There are many different ways of getting to know what your customers want but in this post, we’ll talk about the simplest way: directly asking your customers themselves.

On the internet, it is difficult to ascertain another person’s identity, especially so if they are anonymous. However, it is actually simpler to straight up ask them for what they want, of course not in a literal sense. The most convenient tool for this job is Qeryz.

What is Qeryz?

Qeryz is an on-site survey tool for webmasters. It is essentially a tool that gives your website’s visitors a voice – and trust me, that voice will make a difference. Knowing the right questions to ask is one thing to consider but if done right, converting your visitors from passive supporters to active advocates of your business can become a fairly simple thing to do.

Some websites might resort to some black-hat techniques that honest businessmen may frown upon but relying on Qeryz to get to know your customers on a more intimate level is definitely the right thing to do. People love talking about themselves and Qeryz allows them to do just that but in a way that will benefit your business.

Getting to know what your website’s visitors want out of your website may seem like a small thing but in reality, it’s a very big thing that could improve your reputation with your customers as well as enabling you to get to know them.

Many websites opt for promoting their lowest performing links or products. While this isn’t bad practice, it isn’t always right. With Qeryz, being able to know exactly what the majority of your customers and potential customers want is really easy.

How does Qeryz work?

Qeryz relies on information gathered from the Net Promoter Score or NPS. In one of our previous posts, we discussed that NPS is a technique used to gauge your customers’ interest in your website and if not, find out what you can do to change that.  This is done by having Qeryz casually pop up and ask them this seemingly innocuous question. The single question approach gives your customers incentive in answering your survey. Not only will the survey make them feel valued, it’s also a single question survey and takes 3 or more seconds to complete. A follow-up question is possible and it could be done with a separate e-mail. It’s that simple. 1 or 2 questions is enough to garner you actionable data which is enough for you to make things better for your customers and for your business.

The simpler approach using NPS is great because it’s not a hassle and research has shown that surveys with more questions tend to get less data, primarily because people don’t find the motivation or have the time to answer them.

NPS’ strength

The real strength of NPS and by extension, Qeryz, is finding actionable data to use to your advantage. While many people would assume that it would take a considerable effort to gather actionable data, the advantage with Qeryz is that it makes that process short, sweet and thorough. 1 or 2 question surveys tend to gather more actionable data because people don’t think that it is a hassle to answer a survey that takes less than a minute to complete.

NPS is reliable because you can use that data to improve your business and what your website offers to your customers. However, another advantage with Qeryz is having actionable data that you can use to compare how you’re doing with that of your competitors. In this time and age, knowledge is power and Qeryz is the key to get you that knowledge.

Qeryz, in a nutshell

Qeryz offers the same depth and number of services and tools that other similar products in the market offer – at a more reasonable price. Here are some of Qeryz’s features in a nutshell:

1. Checkbox Survey – Running a multiple choice survey for multiple responses has never been easier than with Qeryz.
2. Color Schemes – One of the most important things about adding third party apps to your website is that they should be customizable to fit your theme and not the other way around. Qeryz comes with numerous color options and palettes and all of them are free for you customize to your heart’s content.
3. E-Mail Notification – Qeryz understands that everyone is busy so they added a feature where responses to your surveys are directly sent to your designated e-mail. Access your responses anytime, anywhere.
4. Left or Right Positioning – Qeryz understands the importance of having a clean website so in order to be unobtrusive as possible, Qeryz can be placed on either the left side or the right side of your website.
5. Mobile Responsive – Most people access the internet on their mobile phone compared to last decade where people mostly used their computers. Qeryz is fully compatible with all mobile devices.
6. Net Promoter Score – NPS is a data gathering technique used worldwide and Qeryz gives you access to that data anytime, anywhere.
7. WordPress Compatibility – Many blogs run on WordPress and Qeryz appreciates that. Qeryz has a WordPress plugin that allows installation to your website at the press of a button.

There are many more advantages to Qeryz and the best part is that it is fairly simple service that gives you the most bang out of your buck. Are you interested in making your website the best that it can possibly be? Head on over to Qeryz’s website to find out more!

The post Get the Most Out of Online Reputation Mangement With Qeryz appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Scanning your website is an essential part of making it secured from malicious attacks. Undoubtedly, malicious attacks will destroy your brand reputation and negatively impacts the user experience which in turn hurts your Google search rankings.

In fact, if you’re taking the security of your website lightly, you’re allowing the bad guys to sabotage the search rankings as well as your online business.

If you’re not scanning your website regularly, below are a few ways how your website will get impacted.

• Negative SEO: Did you know that your competitors could hurt your search rankings by folowing black-hat SEO techniques to build harmful backlinks to your website? Yes, it’s totally possible and this practice is called negative SEO.
• Malicious Attacks: While some hackers attack a website for stealing personal data and building backlinks to their associated websites, etc. others do it just for fun. So just because yours is a small website, it doesn’t guarantee that you are safe from malicious attacks.
• Website Errors and Deprecated Codes: If you’re using an outdated plugin that is no longer supported, chances are it may comprise errors and many deprecated functions, which will be potentially vulnerable to your site. Vulnerable codes are not only prone to malicious attacks but also slow down your site, which negatively impacts the user experience as well as search rankings.

There are a lot of precautionary steps you can take to avoid getting your WordPRess site infected by malicious code. In this post, I’ll explain how to scan your website for better security and how to find if your site is prone to malicious attacks.

Protecting your site from Negative SEO

Regularly monitoring your Google Search Console account is one of the best ways to identify if your site is hit by potentially malicious attacks. Aside from that, you’ll also need to monitor Google Analytics data on a regular basis. If you could find a sudden drop in Google search traffic, chances are your site is negatively impacted by malicious codes provided that you haven’t violated Google Webmaster Guidelines.

If you identified a potential vulnerability on your site, you’ll need to take a deeper look into the potential causes and figure out ways to fix them.

Fixing Negative SEO Impacts

Before jumping into fixing malicious attacks on your website, one of the first things that you’ll need to do is securing your server. Unless your site is hosted on a secure server, your site won’t be protected from possible future attacks. So all the reversing actions you take would only be a temporary measure.

Make sure that your site is hosted on a premium web hosting provider like WP Engine of SiteGround. Once you have secured yours erver, below are a few ways to fix malicious attacks.

Remove Spammy Backlinks

If your site is affected by Negative SEO, you can find tons of harmful backlinks to your site. To get a detailed list of backlinks to your website, you may use a tool like Ahrefs.

Needless to say, irrelevant links are harmful to your website. Below are a few ways to get rid of them.

• Email the Webmaster: Send an email request to website owners to remove the link. Tell them those links are vulnerable for both yours and their website.
• Disavow Vulnerable Backlinks: If the website owners doesn’t remove the links, you may have to disavow them through the Google Search Console.

Check for Duplicate Content

Redistributing your content all over the web can also hurt your rankings. On the flipside, even if users might not want to hurt your search ranking when copying your content, it can cause a negative impact on your search rankings. I personally use and recommend CopyScape.com to identify content theft.

All you need to do is enter your URL and check if it’s duplicated or not.

Monitor your Site Speed

Sending thousands of requests to your server at a time could bring your site down. If you find a huge drop in your site speed, check if it is caused by spam attacks. You may need to use a tool like Pingdom.com to monitor the speed of your website and uptime.

You can set an alert on Pingdom so you’ll be the first to know when your site is down. This will help you take action before it is too late.

Scanning Your WordPress Website

It is not a surprising fact that WordPress is a favorite target for hackers because it is the most popular website builder out there.

Precisely because WordPress is a popular target for hackers, you should be extra conscious in terms of security of your WordPress site. In fact, you can’t guarantee its safety unless you regularly monitor for malicious attacks and take corrective actions against it if it exists.

How do you monitor your WordPress website for malicious attacks? Read on to find out.

Precautionary Step: Use Virus Total

While it is always recommended to install a free theme or a plug-in only from the official WordPress directories, many authoritative theme developers and agencies prefer not listing their quality free themes in the official directory. It’s mainly because the guidelines of the official directory don’t allow them to bundle tons of functionalities from out-of-the-box in their free theme. So when it comes to finding free themes, official directories are not the only show in town.

If you’re installing a free WordPress theme outside the official directory, make sure to check for potentially malicious code before installing it on your production site.

All you need to do is to upload the theme files to a free scanning site like VirusTotal.com. If your website is infected, you’ll get a red signal.

What if you’ve already installed many themes on your WordPress website? Below are a few ways to determine whether or not your website contains vulnerable themes or plugins.

Theme Authenticity Checker

Theme authenticity checker is a free plugin that scans your theme files for potentially malicious code. It searches the source files of your installed themes for signs of malicious code. If an unwanted code is found on an installed theme, the plugin will show you the path to the theme file, the line number and the suspected snippet.

As many third-party websites are offering free WordPress themes with encoded script slipped in, it is always better to check their authenticity using this plugin.

Exploit Scanner

Exploit Scanner is another free plugin that is much more robust than the TAC plugin. Along with theme source files, the plugin also searches the posts and comments tables of the database of your WordPress install for anything suspicious. It just shows that suspicious code and the rest is left to the user.

Please note that this plugin will return a lot of false positives, so before installing it on your site you should know if errors are actually malicious or not.

Key Takeaway

I hope that this article gives you some insights on how to detect suspicious activities on your website. It is highly recommended to scan your website regularly to detect malicious files and unknown activities. Below are some precautionary steps you should take in order to ensure the security of your website.

• Set-up Email alerts – Aside from regularly monitoring your Google Search Console account, make sure you’re subscribed to email alerts so that you will be updated if your site is attacked by malware or if you get a manual penalty or even server connectivity problems.
• Update Regularly – Make sure you always upgrade the WordPress core software, WordPress themes and plugins regularly. This will reduce the probability of being hacked.
• Use Pingdom: Subscribe to a service like Pingdom to track uptime, downtime and the performance of your website.

Author Bio:

Shahzad Saeed specializes in content marketing for startups and small businesses. You can hire him for your next writing project.

The post How to Scan Your WordPress Website for Better Security and Improved Search Rankings appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Scenario #1

You’re applying for a new job – it’s in an industry where you have a great deal of expertise and the company is growing like wildfire. You’ve put together a great CV with your latest projects, and your first interview has gone really well. Things are looking up, right? Well, not exactly. The HR manager decides to do a quick search for your name on Google.

That’s when things go pear-shaped. Here’s a forum post you wrote 5 years ago talking about that hotel you trashed in Vegas. There’s an old Facebook photo of you guzzling down a beer-bong. In one of the pictures you look stoned, and in a drunken tweet from your best friend’s bachelor party you say something that could be construed as sexist. They don’t call back for a second interview.

Scenario #2

Your audio-video production company is on the verge of a big contract with a major player in the local concert scene, and you can almost taste the boost that your business will receive from landing such a good job. Your networking has really paid off, and a mutual friend’s recommendation virtually guarantees you the contract.

However, like almost everyone does these days, the client runs an additional search on your company’s name. On the 4th result disaster strikes. A bitter, slightly unhinged ex-employee has been ranting about your treatment of workers. Everywhere he can. The next 6 results are just as bad. You don’t get the contract.

What is Reputation Management?

The two scenarios above are just examples, but it’s important for you to know that these situations occur every single day. Reputation management (also known as ORM or online reputation management) is the process of assessing the potentially harmful search results that come up with brand name and legal name queries, and then preparing a strategy to take control of those results. This includes managing at least the first page of results as well as any harmful image results.

Reputation management isn’t strictly the same as vanilla SEO, because it focuses on creating a positive aura around a person / brand without necessarily focusing on driving traffic, as most search-engine traffic does not come via direct brand-name queries. Reputation management is also an ongoing process, so it includes having a system in place to monitor up-to-date mentions of your name or brand, ensuring that a pristine results page today doesn’t turn into a nightmare tomorrow.

Why is it important?

SEO Hacker readers are ahead of the curve, so I shouldn’t have to go into too much detail here. If you want to make a living – and not just on online – then reputation management is something that you absolutely need to understand and control. Not having it handled can lose you business, job opportunities and even friends.

Sometimes the results may not even be malicious, but just undesirable. Consider the example of a company that has a consumer-facing platform as well as a corporate website. The brand names are the same, so that when consumers search for the brand they are often led to the corporate site, which doesn’t fulfill their needs, so they move onto a different brand. They’re probably not coming back in this ‘one-and-done’ online culture.

How can I affect it?

When you decided to take control of your online reputation, you can go about it in 2 ways. If you have knowledge of the art of SEO and a grasp of link-building, content generation, etc, then you can use your skills to ensure that you rank for the most important keyword of all – your own name! It’s useful to also have a grasp of social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube and Facebook pages in order to manage customer relations across multiple platforms, or even just to make sure that you ‘own’ your own name on these platforms.

If you are only just beginning to learn about the world of SEO, or don’t feel that you have enough time to go through the necessary steps, then you can always outsource the work to a growing number of reputation management firms that specialize in removing unwanted results. An advantage of outsourcing is that some companies even go so far as to be able to influence things like Google’s Autocomplete feature, ensuring that Google doesn’t serve up unwanted suggestions when people search for your name.

When Should I Start?

This article was just the beginning. Now that you have a grasp of what reputation management is and why it’s so important, it’s up to you to begin implementing strategies to make sure that you don’t end up on the wrong end of scenarios #1 and #2! The first step is to find out what’s out there right now – so don’t be shy – Google yourself:) You should also delve into more advance material such as Rand Fishkin’s ‘Reputation Management Advanced Tactics’ post.

Have you had any experience with negative reputation on the net? What did you do to combat it? Share any horror stories or reputation recovery anecdotes that you’ve heard in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

The post Why You Need to Master Reputation Management – Now! appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Most people more than likely equate SEO with a system in which you can promote a business site or an affiliate site in order to get more business drawn to your site so you can make some profit. However, that is not all SEO can do for you. In fact, you can, if done properly use this same system to help you manage your online reputation.

Remember, that your online reputation can actually end up reflecting back upon your “real life” reputation and that can have a lot of negative effects on your life in the long run. It may even have enough influence to cause problems in school, if you are a student, problems at work and could even keep you from getting into a good college or even getting a job.

You can check out our Online Reputation Management Tutorial to know more about it

Important Things to Remember

1. Before you can even begin to try and manage your online reputation, you first have to assess it and see what is going on. You can simply do that by typing in your name in a variety of different search engines and then go and set up search alerts for your name.

2. If you find something that seems unflattering you need to ask yourself if you posted it. For example did you post some photos on a photo account that you really should have kept private? If so, delete them or adjust your privacy settings. If there are offensive things present that you had nothing to do with, you can use Google URL removal tool and it will stop it from showing up in search results.

3. If something is posted on a high traffic news site you can help manage your online reputation by using a service called Brand Yourself and you can do this by creating a positive profile of yourself with your full name and use as many positive links as you can in your favor on the news site that has something negative about you. The more positive things you add to your profile the quicker the negative will be eliminated.

4. If you can’t get rid of the negative completely, your only other choice is to create more positive content as often as you can in order to push the negative results about you down further and further in the rankings. This is where social networks come into play and can become powerful tools. Places like Facebook and Twitter carry a lot of SEO power, more so than just a blog. So it is important to use these two as tools to better your online reputation.

5. Another SEO technique is to make yourself an identity hub. This is one way you can help to push up your positive presence even more. This is a hub that will link to all of your positive content that you are trying to get people to see.

6. You need a domain name and it should include search terms that include your name. You need to make sure to mention yourself when are trying to get the attention of the search spiders. You want these spiders to know the page is about you. So, a good way to do this is to make sure that you use your name often. A good way to do that is to make sure your name is used in both headers and tabs.

7. Do your best to get links to your content on your page. The more links you have from other reputable sites the better off your online reputation is going to be. Generally, each link that you have of your site on another site is almost like a vote for your personal site and for you. The more you have the better off you are going to be.

8. Don’t forget to use Twitter and Facebook and the various links you might be able to get from these two sources. Their links or “votes” can be very influential on how good of an online reputation you are going to have.

9. Get your site linked onto as many reputable sites as you can find and then take all of these sites and put them as links on your identity hub.

10. It is also going to help your reputation if you do posting often. Make sure that all of the posts you make contain fresh and positive content. In order for more people to see what you are posting, it is a good idea to put all the different social media feeds on your blog and then your posts will automatically be sent out through these different feeds.

11. Do your best to be active with your online community. This means to make sure that you participate in a positive manner such as posting on forums and blogs that are in the same category as yours and offer positive feedback to others. The more positive interactions you have with others on their sites, the better off your reputation is going to be.

12. Another thing you can do is to join some free websites that allow you to publish you articles. Some examples of sites that do this are Buzzle, Content Articles and Helium. Here you can post positive content that will help build your online reputation. You should probably try and post one article on a topic that you know a lot about once a week.

13. Don’t forget to take your personal blog and make sure that it is registered with several different reputable blog directories like Blog Catalog or Blogflux, just to name a couple.

14. Don’t forget to get involved with hosted blog sites like WordPress or Blogger. You can set up accounts at either of these online sites and get your positive image out to the public with their easy software programs.

15. Always remember to define your keywords sensibly, create your own searches and plug these results into your RSS reader.

All of these things can contribute to helping you either clean up your reputation or ensure that your online reputation is kept intact at all times. Remember that the best policy is to always post things that are positive and are going to look positive to all who see it. Try to avoid sharing private things that could come back to haunt you at a later date.

The post 15 Different Ways On How You Could Manage Your Online Reputation Using SEO appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

One of the best and most manipulative ways that you can clean a bad reputation using Online Reputation Management is through creating a mininet. This process takes a lot of time and is not really easy – but if you do it right, it pays off.

Not a Linkwheel

A mininet is a series of websites under your full control – independent blogsites that are not in the same Class-C IP – which is linked to each other in a ‘natural way’ and are at least vertically relevant with each other but have the same target keywords.

The keywords that you are trying to clean.

Class C IP Clarification

Class-C is a segment in an IP address. Take this IP as an example: 192.168.324.33 – The third segment number (324) is the C segment. The segments are classed as A,B,C,D. Meaning 192 is segment A. 168 is segment B. And 33 is segment D.

It all starts with

A website – and you need a handful. At least 5 websites in order to create a ‘mininet’. I know, this ain’t really white-hat but it ain’t really SEO either. This is Online Reputation Management and things are pretty different. It’s 10 times more work than SEO.

Not to worry, all methods and techniques that will be applied to the mininet SHOULD be white hat methods. Otherwise, your mininet will be at risk. You don’t want that.

9 Steps to Set it up

1. Buy the website – try to get a domain name that has your target ORM keywords in.
2. Put those ORM Keywords in the Site title / Site name.
3. Create a different design for each one – different template and preferably different coding structure or language.
4. Start populating it with good content.
5. Let it age – like wine. Well, maybe not that long.
6. Drive in traffic thru social media, blogs, search, PPC, and what have you.
7. Interlink the mininet sites with each other – make sure that your visitors are led to the other mininet sites.
8. Link out to all your social media profiles from these mininet sites (Social Media Reputation Management)
9. Create more content and let it age some more until they push the bad reputations down.

It’s an investment

Great articles for 5 different websites don’t come cheap. You really have to invest in the content that you are going to put in the mininet. Interlinking these content with each other ain’t an easy job too.

Getting websites that are not in the same Class-C IP is also not a joke. That means you can’t just put them in a reseller account. You have to get them from different webhosts which use different Class-C IPs in order to successfully pull this off.

A mininet in the same Class-C IP is next to useless.

Tips for keeps: If you want to secure your brand – do a mininet now. It’s also one of the best prevention methods there is.

The post Mininet Creation appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Search Engine Reputation Management is getting increasingly popular these days. These are times when free thought and opinion is honored by the search results in blogging platforms, forums, social networks, etc. Because of this, companies that commit mistakes (who doesn’t?) can face grave consequences in having bad reputation results in the search engines. Reverse SEO is exactly for managing these negative search engine results.

When a bad Reputation pops up

You won’t really know when one of your employees or high level staff will do something stupid. You won’t really know if or when your product will fail. You won’t really know if an unreasonable, irate customer will walk in your door. You won’t really know if that customer knows how to do SEO. You won’t really know when you’re gonna get a bad reputation in the search engines. What you need to know is what to do when this happens.

How you can put it down

There are different ways and approaches that you can do in order to put a bad reputation in the search results down. There’s the ‘strategic’ method and the ‘grinding’ method.

Strategic

1) Tell Google

If something goes wrong, the first thing you can do is to check if there is anything against Google guidelines in the entry. If there is, you can report them to the big daddy of search and have that entry de-indexed. Here’s Google’s ‘against the guidelines’ list:

• My confidential, personal information is appearing in search results (e.g. name, address, phone number, medical records)
• A piece of content I am concerned about has already been removed by the webmaster but still appears among the search results
• I have found a site that is engaging in suspicious behavior
• I would like incorrect or inaccurate information to be removed from search results
• My full name or the name of my business appears on an adult content site that’s spamming Google’s search results
• A page appearing in Google’s search results is violating my company’s trademark rights
• One or more pages on my site have been removed due to a legal complaint, and I would like them restored.
• I have a legal issue that is not mentioned above

2) Settlement

There is arguably nothing more fulfilling than being reconciled with a brother. Reaching a mutual agreement between the offended party who owns the bad reputation and the company itself can sometimes be the best and easiest way to remove a bad reputation from the web. It can be accomplished in 3 easy steps:

1. Contact the webmaster
2. Ask for a meeting – be at your best
3. Negotiate for a compromise between both parties

This is usually done in the form of monetary settlements. Since the company has incurred personal, (and sometimes emotional) damage to the customer, there can be high demands from the offended party. If the bad reputation is affecting the business and the brand in a negative way, take care of it.

Weigh it out. Are the demands of the customer weightier than the damages incurred of the bad reputation? If it’s a no, then give in to the demands. Don’t think about it anymore – just do it. Every second, there are 3 billion searches happening globally. Why take a risk? Who knows if .1% of those searches could be about your brand?

Grinding – Reverse SEO

There is only one way to go with the grinding method – own the top 10 search results. It is using SEO to outrank any negative web result in the SERP. This is difficult and includes 10 times more effort than SEO. Ranking 10 websites ain’t easy – especially if you don’t own some of those websites.

Reverse SEO can be summarized in 7 steps:

1. Identify the bad reputation with regards to the brand / business keyword
2. Analyze the competitive edge of that bad reputation site – backlinks, on site structure, social media authority, etc…
3. Build on the keyword using off-site SEO on websites and other web properties you don’t own
4. Build on the SEO of websites and web properties that you own
5. Interlink those properties
6. Get the backlinks of that bad reputation page and point them to your properties
7. Repeat until desired effect is achieved

This is a no-brainer grinding method with Reverse SEO – but it sure is effective. The only concern is if the company keeps repeating its mistakes – this will lead to more bad reputation. And if that bad news reaches journalists and other bloggers / publishers in the web, no matter how good an Online reputation management specialist you are, you won’t be able to beat that buzz.

Remember: The best Online Reputation Management Strategy is prevention.

The post Reverse SEO appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Social media is a key player to your online reputation management. Good things and bad things are posted everyday. Some get noticed and some get left behind. Extremely good things and controversially bad things get popular – and go viral. Social Media Reputation management is a fluid and critical platform of your online reputation management.

Social media has the ability to make good things even better and bad things even worse. It has the power to supersize information and share them to the world. It puts things in a micrscope and stretches the specimen to the size that the microscope sees. And if your brand is under its supersizing mercy because of ‘something gone wrong’ – your reputation will be greatly affected.

So here’s a simple online reputation management guide to help you in your Social Media Reputation:

Inside the ring

This pertains to your reputation inside the social network. How you deal with news and events and happenings that will tarnish your company’s reputation inside the social network’s ring of influence will be discussed under this category.

Prevention

Creating and publishing great content

Coca Cola’s ‘Content 2020’ video is an example of great content that helped boost their company’s online branding.

This increase in online branding will help drown out any other searches that are happening around in the social network for any other content connected to their brand – including derogatory ones.

Make sure your social account ranks in that social network’s search engine

For example: Make sure your Facebook page is optimized to appear as top result in Facebook’s search engine results when your brand is searched for. There are other ‘hate pages’ that you wouldn’t want ranking above you. There are a lot of social network account optimization tips and strategies available out there.

Here’s one by Kristi Hines: How to Optimize 7 Popular Social Media Profiles for SEO

And here’s another one by your favorite SEO blogger: Google Plus Optimization

Clearance

A lot of things can happen inside the ring. Usually these things are sparked by a disgruntled employee or one of the representatives of your brand doing something stupid – and it is caught or leaked on photo, video, or news.

Truthfulness

If the bad news happened to pierce your prevention strategies, the first step to clearance is to verify the truthfulness of the content. If it is indeed from your company then the best thing you can do is to publish a public apology about it. If the apology is true, chances are, it will also be shared alongside the derogatory content. If the public apology is creative, chances are it will also go viral.

If the content happens to be untrue, you can publish a statement that the company has verified the truthfulness of the content and has concluded that it is misinformation. Again, publishing creative content about the verification of the derogatory content’s truthfulness increases the virality of your innocence.

Any derogatory content published inside the ring gives you no control over it. Chances are, people may keep on sharing that content if it feeds their curiosity and popularity as curators of content. What you can do is create content alongside that derogatory content – and try to make it as viral.

Remember, in online reputation management – when you reach the clearance stage, it means you’ve already lost. Your prevention strategy is always key.

Outside the ring

Social media can still help influence your reputation outside the social network – particularly in the search engines.

Prevention

As mentioned in the first Online Reputation Management tutorial, social network accounts can help your Online reputation management prevention strategy. Getting into all the authoritative social networks, and establishing and optimizing your social network accounts can be a solid foundation for your online reputation outside the ring.

Search engines love real social network accounts. And they usually show up in the search engine results page. Just take a look at Oreo’s example:

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube easily shows up in the top 10 search results. Protecting your top 10 results in the Search engine results page is very important – powerful social network accounts make it so much easier.

There are a lot of ways you can increase the authority and trust of your social network accounts – the best ones are to:

• Link to them
• Optimize them
• Update them frequently by posting in them

Clearance – Contact all those who took your username and ask if they can stop posting bad reputation about you. Contact the social network about it. Build an account and make it rank higher. Brand accounts in Google SERP rarely come by if they are not genuine. That is why prevention is key.

Clearance in the SERP outside the ring deals a lot with SEO. If the derogatory content has pierced through your prevention strategy outside the ring (in the search engines), you can use your key social network accounts to outrank them. It’s much like using your chess pieces to make strategic moves. Social network accounts are your best pieces in the search engine playing field. Knowing how to use these to your advantage in the search engines will make clearance a lot easier for you.

If there are other people who took hold of your brand username before you and are ranking higher in the search engines, contact the social network about it. Twitter does a good job at returning brand name accounts to the proper owners. Allianceinteractive does a great job of walking us through this.

Here are some options you have of regaining control of your brand on twitter:

–   Use the web form or email terms@twitter.com along with the following information:

Your existing username,  the username you want, along with an explanation your brand name being taken, detail if you are looking to start a new account or switch your account from your existing username to the new account name.

–   After 9months of inactivity, Twitter will generally release the account back to its proper owner.

Policy: Twitter is not currently releasing inactive user names. Unless your user name issue involves Terms of Service violations, you’ll have to wait until all inactive user names are released. We’re working on a better long term solution for this, and we should have more news soon.

–   Advise Twitter about abuse or misrepresentation, Twitter will shut down the account based on fraudulent activity.

Policy: If your user name request concerns impersonation, trademark infringement, copyright, or another Terms of Service violation, please submit a request to the Terms of Service group via the web form. Be sure to pick the right item from the drop down box for expedited help. Keep in mind that if there is no content and no intent to mislead, there is most likely no infringement.

–   Twitter has instituted Twitter Verified Account, read more about Twitter Verified Accounts at http://twitter.com/help/verified.
–   Post a complaint on Twitter’s getstatisfaction.com/twitter website.
–   Secure legal counsel and have your counsel draft an action letter.

Big Brands know the value of using Twitter, take advantage of Twitters incredible growth and make sure to secure your brand name today.  Protect your brand (even if you have no intent of using Twitter) make sure to take your name and secure it to prevent someone from hijacking your brand.

Social Media Reputation Management is tricky. The only real way you can have a good chance of clearance is if your prevention strategy is solid.

Tips for Keeps: Grab your brand’s most strategic and powerful social network accounts and optimize them as soon as you can.

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Online Reputation Management (ORM) deals with everything about your company’s brand in the online community. This community includes the entire web – search engines, forums, blogs, news sites, social networking sites, etc…

Online Reputation Management is first being mindful of your company’s online brand then building on that brand in the search engines (chances are this is where you are sought for the most) through social media and other websites that produce and disseminate content.

Online Reputation Management is done through a funnel of three main processes:

Being mindful of your company’s online brand (Monitoring)

First and foremost, you have a brand – as the owner and manager of that brand, you have to be mindful about it. Know what’s happening to your brand. Know what’s the latest news about it. Know what people think about it. Where are you mentioned? What are they talking about when your brand is mentioned?

There are tons of tools that you can use in order to monitor your brand in the online world:

Google Alerts

This will be your best friend when you’re monitoring your brand online. You can track web results, news, blogs, video results, and groups results. There is no better way to get all of your brand mentions than Google Alerts. ‘Nuff said.

Yahoo Alerts

Set up  for free to track news by keyword, stocks, local news, feeds and more. Receive notifications via email, Yahoo Messenger or mobile.

Twitter Search

Twitter has grown to be one of the best places to monitor your brand in. Almost everyone in the Twitter world retweets content with or without hashtag. The beauty of Twitter search is that it also lets you set-up search parameters such as dates, links, location, sentiment, Twitter account, and more.

Social Mention

Social mention is the social media version of Google Alerts. It helps you monitor your brand in different social platform throughout the web. you can subscribe to the feed, get email alerts or download the Excel file.

Building on that brand (Prevention)

Online Reputation Management extends to these factors connected to you:

• Your Name
• Company
• Brand(s)
• Product(s)
• High profile employees
• Handles/usernames

If one of these things get affected by a bad reputation, it would usually spread itself to the others like a festering disease. Protecting your name, company, products and high profile employees are carry less impact compared to your brand (which should almost always be your username). For this tutorial, we will be discussing more about your brand and how to protect it.

BRAND / USERNAME:

This is the best thing you can do in managing your online reputation. Build and build and build and build on your brand. Branding is key to ORM. Surprisingly, it’s also arguably your most powerful asset when it comes to SEO. Building your brand can start from getting all of your brand’s social media usernames. You can find it out using Knowem.

As soon as you know on which social media sites your brand is still available as a username, grab the opportunity to register it there. These accounts are your online licenses to build ‘online real estates’. It will boost the chances of you filling up the first page of your brand SERP if you own powerful social media accounts with your brand as a username.

Some of the key social media accounts you SHOULD get are:

• Facebook profile / page
• Twitter
• Google+ Account / page
• Quora
• LinkedIn

If you have these accounts, interlink them with each other and link to them from your blog / website and they should rank really well in the search engines.

Get a Blog

Another great way to prevent bad reputation webpages from ranking as your brand is to create and maintain a blog. Search engines love blogs. That’s enough for you to know that you SHOULD get a blog for yourself in order for you to rank well and to have that powerful leverage for your brand that you can flexibly use whenever there is any newly published bad reputation out there.

There are a lot more reasons why you should have a blog for your company – you can publish company news, establish a readership, promote products and services, etc…

We will be discussing more about ORM Prevention methods in the next lessons of this tutorial.

Fixing any damaging content to your brand (Cleaning)

Once the damage is done and you don’t have any ammo to fire back, here’s what you need to immediately do:

• Hire an ORM consultant
• Contact the owner of the bad reputation site and humbly ask if he/she can put it down
• If it is against the law, contact any possibly concerned government body and ask them for help to bring it down
• Ask Google to de-index it if there are any elements in the page against Google’s guidelines

If all of those are not an option for you, start with getting all those powerful social media accounts and create a network of links to them using your website. Start a blog and interlink that blog with those social accounts and with your main website. It will take more time for these to rank – and most probably the damage will already be done by then.

ORM work is mostly about establishing that bullet-proof reputation in the web by getting all the possible ‘real estate accounts’ you can for your brand.

As much as possible, the Online Reputation Management campaign / work SHOULD NOT reach the Cleaning stage. It amplifies the workload on any Online Reputation Manager – all the while the damage has already occurred. The funny thing is, most companies that look for Online Reputation Management only do so whenever there is damage already done. Online Reputation Management is not about damage control, it is about establishing online brand foundations.

Tips for Keeps: If you have not already taken your brand name as your username in all the powerful social networking sites, do it. Now.

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A business’ reputation is arguably its most valuable asset. Marketing is all about brand building. We invest in our brand because we believe it is what will make the business grow and flourish. Once that brand gets a bad reputation, everything about the business gets dramatically affected. Online Reputation Management is all about protecting your brand or cleaning it if things get dirty.

The internet is an area of free ideas, facts, opinions and voice. It is a place where you can directly or indirectly find almost anything and everything you’re looking for. It is also a place mostly beyond your control. And often times, there will be people you don’t agree with – and people who don’t agree with you. When this happens, the internet can be a very messy place.

Disgruntled customers today mostly vent out their anger and frustration in the web – where  they can freely do so and have an audience to boot. For companies, it might be unfair that these occurrences take place – but often times the ‘unfair incident’ happened to the customer first, and the web is their place of justice.

So just how do you make sure that these rants don’t go into the first page of the search engines? How do you prevent unwanted, devastating comments and feedback from popping up in the top results of the Search Engine Results Page?

I’ve compiled an Online Reputation Management Tutorial / Guide for you so that you can do your part in helping your company / other companies protect or fix their reputation on the web.

This Online Reputation Management Tutorial consists of the Following:

  Online Reputation Management & How to do it

   Social Media Reputation Management

  Reverse SEO – Search Engine Reputation Management

  Mininet Creation

We will be completing this tutorial one entry at a time.

Other Tutorials you might be interested in:

Linkbuilding Techniques

Linkbuilding Tutorial

On Site Optimization Tutorial

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