Managing Your Online Reputation

Just how important is your online reputation?

Reputation management is the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop.

However, managing to keep up to speed with what is being said about your company and brand on the web is a tough job. The internet is a 24/7/365, always on medium which means that opinions, views and comment is being broadcast without respite.

A high ‘social status’ means having your website or company consistently talked about and discussed online. One of the major benefits of this can be an increased number of relevant links pointing to your website – leading to higher rankings in search engine natural listings (SERPS).

When it comes to your online reputation, preventing damage is easier than curing it. However, in the unfortunate event of a crisis situation arising, you will need sound advice and a suggested course of action for your company to follow. This will minimise the long-term damage done, and provide you with opportunities to recover from it.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Following the roll out of Web 2.0 and multi media functionality, there has been an explosion in social media which is more widely known as social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

SMM goals will vary for every business or organisation, however most will involve some form of viral marketing to build idea or brand awareness, increase visibility, and possibly sell a product or service. SMM may also include online reputation management.

The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing
Any and all forms of Social Media Marketing tactics fall under at least one of these five forms of action. Often the same channel will incorporate two or more of these:

• Declaration of Identity
• Identity through Association
• User-initiated Conversation
• Provider-initiated Conversation
• In-Person Interaction

Still the best way to improve your search engine rankings is to get as many high quality natural links as possible. Releasing interesting content and promoting it using social news websites can lead to a steady increase of on-topic links.

Building a Blog
Blogs are web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites. Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimisation. Most blog software (such as WordPress or Blogger) offer uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

RSS / Tailored News Feeds

What are News Feeds?
News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.

Feeds are also known as RSS. RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like websites. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people plump for ‘Really Simple Syndication’.  

RSS feeds can be viewed through a special program called an aggregator or news reader. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. All allow you to display and subscribe to the RSS feeds you want. RSS feeds can also be used within an existing website using a XSLT stylesheet.

Offering Value to Your Website Visitors
One of the ways in which you can firstly attract and then retain visitors to your website is by offering something of value. Value can come in many forms but one of the most common is news content.

1. News feeds allow you to stay up to date with the latest news, as and when it is published.
2. Increase the number of new visitors to your site and encourage repeat visits by supplying newsworthy content
3. Customers know they can find the latest industry developments by visiting your website, thus raising your brand profile.
4. The feed can be linked to your most profitable website pages to encourage users to remain on site for longer to explore your products.

Optimising Website Images

Many website owners understand the benefits of optimising their on-page content, text and copy. Fewer, however are aware of the search engine optimisation (seo) benefits from optimising website images.

GIF’s and JPEG’S
If you want to optimise your website images the first thing you need to know about is the two image formats recognised by your web browser. These are GIF and JPEG. Both JPEG and GIF are compressed. That means that information has been organised inside the file in a special way in order to minimise the file size.

The difference between JPEG and GIF is the way that they compress the data. JPEG compression is designed to optimise photographs or images with fine gradations of colour. GIF compression is designed to optimise images with large continuous areas of colour, such as illustrations.

Image Search
To leverage image search, the image file names could use keywords relevant to the product. Alt text used in the coding of the web page describing the image could do the same as well as a short text caption beneath the image.

The image(s) can be submitted to image sharing web sites like Flickr.com with relevant keywords in the image category, title, description and tags. The description of the product on the image sharing site can include a link back to the product web page on the company web site.

Associating relevant keywords with the image will help media or image search engines understand what the image is, and subsequently categorise and rank it. The link from the image description on the image sharing site can send both visitors and search engines to the product page.

LASTLY…
DO NOT resize your images in your website design program. The result will be a small image with the same file size.

Resize your image in your image editing program.

Universal Search – An Introduction

Universal Search is fast becoming a mainstream term. The latest and greatest versions of the popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com) include more than the text based web pages in the search results.

These “upgraded” search features from the major search engines now also find and bring back results in varying media formats including: images, news, local listings, video, blog posts, products and more depending on the particular search engine.

Thus, Universal Search has opened up new opportunities for businesses to rank in the SERP once reserved for plain text results.

Google Universal Search
At the forefort of the concept are Google who are undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a “Universal Search” system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages. Google has also unveiled a new navigational interface.

Many websites and blogs now focus their articles on the new art of optimsing images, news, video, and blog posts for the search engine results page (SERP). The general consensus of opinion with the search marketing industry is that Universal Search is here to stay!