How’s Your Reputation?
That is a question each SEO should ask. In this industry, just like in any other industry, your repuation is very important if you want to attract customers. I also believe that it is even more important in SEO and other web-based industries because a lot of times customers learn about you without even getting a chance to meet you. In SEO it the phrase “your reputation precedes you” is actually often literally true.
When it comes to managing your online reputation it is important that first of all you actually know what you reputation is. You may be trying hard to build a solid reputation but you need to actually find out how you really are perceived. To do this you need to monitor not just your blog’s comments but other industry-related blogs and forums. This will be too time consuming if you take it to heart and obsess about your reputation by monitoring blogs and forums daily. Not only will it be time consuming but it will often be a fruitless task. To make sure you don’t waste your time but still manage to keep track of your reputation you can simply use social monitoring tools such as Zudos and eSneezer.
Data you can garner from social monitoring tools include everything they can find about you (enter your name/company name/website title) in blogs, social videos, social bookmarking sites, tagged photos, the mainstream media, podcasts, and highest voted stories on different social sites. If you have a blog usually the blog portion will contain your posts but you will see each time a blog mentions you/your site.
Aside from helping you monitor your online reputation to ensure that you are fostering the kind of image you want to social monitoring tools can also be used to keep track of your popularity. Doing well in SERPs is good but I believe it is better to be talked about and have knowledge about your passed on by word of mouth. So if you see that there’s little or no buzz about you in social sites then you’d better start a reputation building campaign to supplement you SEO efforts.
Today is May 18, 2008
Is your SEO strategy up to date?
The only current SEO book on the planet.
Buy the industry standard #1 ranked SEO Book. But don't take my word for it...
This is the #1 ranking SEO book on all major search engines.
The search engines love it. Thousands of webmasters have build their business using SEO Book. Learn why today.
Yeah online reputation management is an important part of many online businesses. I know of a few companies that have top of first page negative search results associated with their name. It can’t be good on business. A lot of people use Google alerts or companies like Trakur to monitor their online reps -
Google Alerts is a pretty good idea though I don’t think you’ll get results for tagged photos and some of the other stuff that the social monitoring tools will give you.