Sometimes, it’s just piles and piles of spammy sites that have nothing to do with them. Other times, it’s someone out to make them look bad, whether that’s a competitor, disgruntled employee, or jilted ex-boyfriend.

When it happens, it’s usually pretty confusing. I’ve gotten several emails that follow this basic outline:

Dear Kevin,

I ran a search for [my name/my company/my brand], and came up with several sites that shouldn’t be there. I’ve emailed Google asking them to remove those pages, but I haven’t gotten a response. How can I get Google to make those pages go away?

Sincerely,
Online Reputation Victim

I have to write them back, and let them know there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that Google is going to remove anything from their index. But thankfully, there is something else they can do: replace those junk results with more relevant results, controlled by them.

Taking control of your search results is the first step toward online reputation management. For individuals and companies that are free from scandal, it may be all they need to do for a long time.

For individuals, the easiest way to accomplish this is to create a website or a blog on your own domain name, such as www.kevinnewcomb.com. Once that’s done, you can link to that domain from all of your soon-to-be-created social media profiles, and link to those profiles from your site.

There are an infinite number of sites where you can create a profile, but some of the best-ranking ones include:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Flickr
• FriendFeed
• MeetUp.com
• Naymz
• Google Profiles

It helps to use your full name when creating these profiles, and to fill out the profiles completely. If there’s an option to allow search engines to find the profile, make sure that’s turned on. And if there’s a place to link to your web site or other social media profiles, take advantage of that too.

Of course, there are plenty of benefits to participating in some of those communities as well, but I’ll address some of those in another post.

First Steps in Online Reputation Management is a post from: Kevin Newcomb

There’s nothing wrong with the question. It makes perfect sense for someone looking for search engine optimization services to ask how much those services will cost. The problem is that the question focuses on search engine optimization (SEO) as a cost, instead of looking at SEO as an investment.

It’s a bit like asking “how long is a piece of string?” The answer, of course, depends on several variables, including:

• How big is the site?
• Is it in a competitive market?
• How long has the site been around?
• Does it have existing inbound links?
• What resources are available on the client side to implement suggested changes?

Perhaps the most important question, and one that’s often overlooked, is “What are the business goals of the site, and how do you expect search to address those goals?”

When I begin an SEO consulting engagement, I’ll start with a quick assessment of the basics: check site structure, check backlinks, look for prior optimization efforts, etc.

The site review/SEO audit looks at the site to determine what on-page factors need to be addressed. This would include structural things like making sure the site is easy for the search engines to crawl, that the title and description tags are optimized, and that each page has enough relevant content on it for search engines to know what it’s about.

I’ll also look here at some very basic ranking reports, to see if the site is showing up for some of the keywords the client thinks are important. I get into much more detail on this later in the process.

All of that information helps both me and the client to understand where we’re at to start with. But the real progress in planning the next move is made once I start talking to the client about what their business goals are, and what they hope to achieve by optimizing their site.

If you keep the conversation focused on SEO, you’ll get answers like “I want to rank for X terms,” or “I want to get more traffic from the search engines.” Those are fine things to want, but they’re not business goals. They’re a means to an end, with no revenue tied to them, and no way to really tell if they help your business at all.

A better goal might be something like, “I want to drive more customers to my lead-generation form,” or “I want customers to find the phone number to call my salespeople.” Those goals can be directly linked to revenue, and can be tracked. Those are goals that we can build a strategy around.

Once a client begins thinking about those goals, we can work on ways to optimize their web site to meet them. Then, instead of thinking of SEO as a cost, they begin to realize that it should be viewed as an investment; an investment that will pay for itself several times over, when done right.

How Much Does SEO Cost? is a post from: Kevin Newcomb