How To Manage And Monitor Your Online Reputation

Anything anyone says about you online has an effect on you and your company. It can be positive (we all hope for this) or it can be negative. Either way, it has an effect.
Managing and monitoring what people are saying about your brand is part of maintaining your brand. This is known as Online Reputation Management.
It takes a lot of hard work to build a solid reputation, and that reputation can be torn down with a single tweet. People will sometimes be negative. They will not like everything you do, and they will share their opinions with others. The best way to fix it is to change your practices if need be, and respond positively where possible. How do you know what they’re saying? Well, you need to monitor your reputation.


Knowing what people are saying about you and your brand is a great indication of the health of your company. And of course, you want people to say good things about you. If there’s something bad out there, you want to know about it so you can fix it. People will usually tell their friends before they will tell you.

Tools to Monitor Your Reputation Online

The first thing you need to do is monitor what others are saying about you and your brand. To do this you will need some tracking tools. There are many good choices out there.
Be sure to monitor variations on your name as well as your actual name. Customers will tend to shorten your name, use acronyms, or even spell it wrong. Now, let’s look at a few tools.


Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for interesting content by creating an alert about a specific topic and having links about your alert sent to you in your email. You can have the alert sent to you once per week, once per day, or as it happens.
You can choose the sources that you wish to get information from. Sources include news, blogs, web, video, books, discussions, or you can choose automatic. It gives you alert suggestions in each of the categories. You can also set your language and region. You can have it set to send you all of the results or only the best results. As you type in your search, the page will give you a preview from each of the sources. You can create as many alerts as you wish. You can also edit or delete your alerts.

You can create alerts for your own website, business, and for yourself and get an email with links where you are mentioned. You can also use it to stay on top of trends and news in your industry. Google Alerts is free to use, you just need a Google account.



It also gives you some scoring info with charts. These sections are explained well with popups that appear with mouse-overs.


They include:
Strength – the likelihood your brand is being discussed on social media.
Sentiment – the ratio of positive and negative mentions.
Passion – the likelihood that those talking about your brand will continue to talk about it.
Reach – your range of influence.

5 Tools to Monitor Your Online Reputation

Why Monitor Your Online Reputation?

It takes time, effort and an elaborate strategy to build a solid company reputation, but everything you’ve worked to build can be undone in just a few hours.

Negativity spreads like wildfire, especially in an environment that’s open 24/7. Any online content, positive or negative, impacts how people view your business.

#1: Watch Industry Websites

If This Then That (IFTTT) automates simple online tasks by using one of the most basic principles: If this happens, then do that.

IFTTT lets you set up rules (called recipes) for everything from getting the latest weather updates as a text message to automatically sending Instagram photos to Twitter (or any other platform). It has both fun and professional applications.

You create a recipe by choosing a trigger channel (the “if this happens” part) and an action channel (the “then do that” part).

To monitor what people are saying about your company, set up a recipe that scans RSS feeds of important industry websites, then sends you a daily email alert with the results—IF [website] mentions your company, THEN receive an email alert.





#2: Track Employee Mentions

Google’s Me on the Web tool notifies you when personal data appears on the web. It’s handy if you want to monitor mentions about certain company employees or senior staff.

Me on the Web is simple to use, but you do need an existing Google account. To set up an alert, click Stay current with web alerts, type your search term(s) in the text box and click Add.






#3: Filter Instant Social Searches

If you want to instantly search blogs, Twitter and Facebook for specific terms, IceRocket is the tool you need.

IceRocket doesn’t require an account and is easy to use. Just type your term(s) in the search box and choose the channel you want to search: blogs, Twitter, Facebook or search all.






#4: Find Influencer Opinions

Topsy is a powerful Twitter search tool (more powerful than Twitter’s native search). Use Topsy to find key influencers related to your industry and company, as well as sentiment scores over a period of time.





#5: Search for Sentiment

Social Mention returns results based on the sentiment of social media buzz around your company. You can monitor multiple websites in one place and even find out which keywords people use when talking about your company.

To set up Social Mention monitoring, type your search term(s) in the text box and choose a channel (e.g., blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, images, videos or questions). You can sort results by date, source and time

The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Positive Brand Image for Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management is something that most people and businesses only think of when they need it. And when they need it is when disaster has struck – a negative review about their business, a negative blog post about their products, or a negative record about themselves surfaces online.

The thing to keep in mind is that online reputation management is one of those things that works better if you implement it before you actually need it. The following are ways to build a positive online reputation before you need it or start building positive online properties to outrank negative news and reviews.

Own Your Own Website

Your first goal for creating a positive online image is having a website. Chances are, you already have one for your business like yourbusiness.com. Be sure to also protect your personal brand by having one for your own name, i.e. firstnamelastname.com. Websites with an exact business or person’s name in the domain generally rank first when someone searches for the name. If you have a website you control at #1 in search results, it will get the most amount of clicks and prevent most people from continuing to look through the rest of the search results.





Own Related Domains


If you want to take it to the next level, build up some other domains for your business or yourself. Hosting companies are notorious for having negative information pop up in search results from bad reviews to anti-their-company groups. GoDaddy tackled this by creating a crop of additional websites with their brand name in the domain.






Start Multiple Blogs


Your main personal or company blog doesn’t have to be your only blog. Thanks to Google+ authorship and Google Direct Connect, you can tell Google a blog on any topic is related to you.

Here are two great examples. Danny Sullivan is well known for being the editor-in-chief for Search Engine Land. If you search for him, you’ll also find his personal blog named Daggle. It comes up in search results for his name simply because he put Danny Sullivan’s Personal Blog in the title of the homepage and connected it to his Google+ profile.






Be Active on Social Media


Notice that I didn’t say create a whole lot of random social profiles that you may never touch again. There’s little point to doing that when reputation management is concerned. Instead, you want to create several strong social profiles on prominent social networks and keep them active and up to date. You will also want to build a strong audience on these networks as well – you could almost consider your number of connections like the number of links to your profile – the more you have, the better they will rank.

Some of the best social profiles to create and routinely maintain that will generally rank well in search results include the following.

Google+ – Profiles for people, pages for business. Make sure you occasionally include your name or business name in a status update or two as well.
Facebook – Profiles for people, pages for business.
Twitter
LinkedIn – Profiles for people, company pages for businesses.
Biznik – People only.
Pinterest – Make sure one of your pins includes your name or business name too!
Myspace – Don’t laugh, it still ranks well in search.
Quora
Flickr
YouTube
Vimeo



Do Interviews


If you or your business is asked to do interviews on blogs, videos, or podcasts, definitely say yes. Typically people will include your name and/or your business name in the title of the resulting content which will rank well in search.






Place a Lot of Images of Yourself Online



This is easily done when you’re creating social profiles and getting guest posts. Having lots of images of yourself online might sound like vanity, but it can trigger image search results for your name or business to pop up, further pushing down potential negative search results. Easy ways to do this is through profile photos on your social networks, author bio pages on your websites & blogs, avatars on forums, and so forth.




Create an App or Podcast


Apple.com is a highly authoritative website, so it is no surprise that any apps or podcasts rank well in search results. As a matter of fact, your app or podcast is almost guaranteed to show up on the first page of search results for your name or your business so long as you include it either in the title or the description.






Publish a Book on Kindle


It doesn’t have to be anything extraordinary although it should be something you would be proud to sell. But when you publish a book on Kindle, you become an author, granting you the privilege of creating an author page on Amazon. Thanks to Amazon’s authority, your author page should rank well in search.





Interlink Everything


One key thing to note with all of these opportunities to build your reputation is that you need to build links to them all and interlink them when possible. Basic SEO 101 – if you want something to rank, you need to build backlinks to it. Some ways to interconnect all of your good online properties and build links to them at the same time include:

Making sure your social profiles link out to your website and blog.

Making sure your website and blog link out to your social profiles and local search profiles.

Adding links to your podcasts, apps, books on Kindle, guest posts, guest posting author bio pages, etc. in your blog content.

Embedding your videos into your blog content and share them on your social networks.

Linking your blogs and subdomains to your main website (when applicable).

Adding anything notable to your Google+ profile links section. Be sure to distinguish social profile links, links to sites you contribute to, and general related links to the proper sections. Don’t forget to +1 them as well.

How to Manage Your Business's Online Reputation

4 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

Online reputation management is a growing field, one that is tightly related to search engine optimization. In both cases the tactics tend to be the same, requiring you to monitor and act on search results to improve your online standing. With SEO, the goal is to make your website rise to the top. With ORM, you're not necessarily concerned about helping your own website rank highly in search results; rather, you want to ensure that positive information and commentary about your business ranks higher than anything negative--no matter who said it.



It's a subtle difference that requires greater and more complicated interaction with a larger range of online constituents. ORM is so important that Google offers a dedicated page with its own advice. In the sections that follow, I'll cover Google's basic tips--and a lot more. I'll also provide brief reviews of a variety of tools and services that can help you tackle the job.

Get Alerts

With a baseline in place, step two is to make sure that you're aware when new content about your business hits the Web. The easiest way to do this is to use Google's free Alerts service. The system is fairly self-explanatory: It emails you when new blog posts or other Web pages are created using terms you want to follow. Type in a query (you'll know from the first exercise which ones are most important), and select how often you want results to come to you (from weekly to "as it happens"). You can filter results--just blog posts, just videos, and so on--and you can allow Google to choose whether to send everything or just "the best" results



Alerts are invaluable for clueing you in to happenings you might otherwise miss completely. My Google Alert for "chris null" told me about an up-and-coming band whose bassist shares my name. For a business, a timely Google Alert can help you head off another company attempting to launch using your name, or it can warn you about someone who is maliciously using your brand to hijack search results.


Another benefit of Google Alerts is that it lets you see whether Google is properly indexing your own blog posts or other Web content you're producing. If you put up a new post and don't receive a link to it in your Google Alerts email, you'll want to make sure that the search site is considering your blog--and if it isn't doing so, you should find out why.

Social Scanning

Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are all key avenues for branding, and users know it. When consumers want to complain about a company, many of them are more likely to tweet about it or kvetch on Facebook than they are to pick up the phone and call customer service. Although you can't control what customers say about your company, you can easily respond to the comments on each of these same services. That response, more than the complaint itself, is often what will determine how you are perceived by other customers who might come across that post or comment in their search results for years to come.

Tools to Make the Task Easier

Keeping track of all this stuff isn't easy. As with managing SEO and your social media presence, dealing with your online reputation can easily consume hours every week, leaving you with no reputation, good or bad, left to manage. Assorted startups and services aim to take some of the pain out of the process. While many ORM services are tied to the related world of social media monitoring, here's a look at some of the bigger names in the business.

Social Mention: This free service offers a mountain of data about mentions in the blogosphere, ranked as positive, neutral, or negative. The top keywords in those posts are also included, along with all sorts of additional minutiae. The value of this information can vary. Unless you have a major (national) brand or a unique word in your business name, expect an awful lot of unrelated and irrelevant results.

Kurrently: This real-time search engine examines Facebook and Twitter results that include the keyword of your choice. Leave the page loaded, and results update in real time. There's not much to it, but Kurrently is fun to check out if something big involving your business is happening. Unfortunately, the service offers no way to send these results to you regularly; you must use the Web interface to see them.

Addict-o-matic: At Addict-o-matic, you can create a "custom page with the latest buzz on any topic." Like Kurrently, it's not of much use unless you have a big brand that you need to follow, and the results are a bit of a hodgepodge. Some of the "news" I found in sample searching was more than three years old. Still, unlike most of these freebie services, it covers a wider range of sources, including Flickr, YouTube, and even Ask.com news.

TweetBeep: This site describes itself as "Google Alerts for Twitter," and that's exactly what it delivers. Add keywords just as you would with Google Alerts, and you get a list of mentioning tweets emailed to you daily.

10 Online Reputation Management Tips for Businesses

1. Optimize Your Site with Your Company Name.

Why? Google will likely see your site as the ultimate authority on your company. Authoritativeness on a topic is one of many important signals the search engine considers when matching content to a search query and then ranking that content among other results. By properly optimizing more than one page for your company name, you'll help keep those pages at or near the top of search results. Not only does this give your site greater visibility in search results, it may also help push down not-so-positive content about your company that you can't control.

The best practice is to use your company name in important places such as the HTML title tag and URL (if possible), particularly on pages that describe your company, such as About Us or Contact Us.






2. Diversify Your Web Presence.

Your goal should be to proactively own as many slots in the Google top 10 search results for keywords you care about, says Don Sorenson, president of Big Blue Robot, which offers corporate online reputation management services. For one thing, it shows your companys dominance in that topic. For another, you'll have a better chance of keeping negative content about your company or its products out of the top 10.

To achieve top 10 dominance, your Web presence should be spread out among your company's site, related blogs, and social media networks such as LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook Fan pages, YouTube and Twitter. Google's search engine technology views these social network sites as authoritative and trustworthy; both are important factors in how highly content on those sites is ranked.






3. If You Have to Choose One Social Network, Make It LinkedIn.

Social media takes a lot of time and effort to manage. If you must limit your resources, focus on LinkedIn.an online reputation management service. LinkedIn profiles tend to rank higher than some other social media network content, and it's particularly important for B2B companies, as many people search on LinkedIn instead of Google for professional services.






4. Get Other Sites to Link to Yours with Anchor Text—But Don't Overdo It.

Anchor text is a hyperlinked word or phrase, such as online management tips for job seekers, that when clicked takes you to another Web page. Search engines use anchor text to determine the relevancy of the page being linked to. If several pages on authoritative, trustworthy sites link to the tips article using the above anchor text link, it helps that article rise in search result rankings for that phrase.

The best way is to simply ask others to link to you using keyword-rich anchor text relevant to your business. But don't ask everyone to link to your site using the same anchor text, Sorenson says. Google is wise to all the different ways people try to game the system and may demote your content for aggressive anchor-text practices.

5. Proactively Monitor Your Search Results at Least Once a Month.

Google your company name at least once a month, Beal suggests. Do it much more frequently if you're a large company in the news fairly often. Set up Google Alerts for important keywords so you know as soon as possible when new content about you hits the Web.

Don't simply look at the first page of Google results, advises Beal. Even though the vast majority of search engine users don't go any further, you should always check pages two and three for negative content. Given how frequently search rankings change, that content could end up on page one overnight.

Keep an eye out for any content on the second or third page of results that might be negative, because it might work its way to the first page. Track what you see in a spreadsheet with columns for the URL, page title, status of the page (whether you own it, control it, or have some influence over it) and the sentiment (whether it is positive, negative or neutral).







6. To Counteract Negative Content, Contact Its Creator.

Even if you do monitor your results proactively, you might wake up one morning, Google your company, and find an unpleasant surprise. The bigger your company, the more likely you'll discover negative content mixed in with your top search results.







7. Pay Attention to Your Offline Reputation, Too.

If negative content about you becomes a trend, you need to understand why? Treat your customers and clients well, and encourage those who are happy with you to leave reviews on Yelp. Focus on your reputation in the offline world, and your online reputation will fix itself."







8. Send Out Optimized Press Releases on a Regular Basis.

Believe it or not, search-optimized press releases can rank highly in Google for relevant keyword searches, giving your company another opportunity to own a top Google slot. For instance, Sorenson posted a release on PRWeb that is optimized for the phrase corporate online reputation management. Even though the release was posted in April, it still ranked within the top five Google results for that phrase as of early August.







9. Pay Attention to Your Wikipedia Page.

Wikipedia entries about companies nearly always rank within the top five results.In most cases, you won't have to look further than the first three or four search results to find its Wikipedia entry.You can't control Wikipedia entries because anyone can edit them. You shouldn't get directly involved in your Wikipedia article, either; that's technically a conflict of interest, according to Wikipedia community guidelines. If there is negative or incorrect information on your company Wikipedia page, ask the Wiki community for suggestions on how to fix it.







10. Don't Expect Miracles.

It's so important to proactively own or at least influence top Google search results because it's extremely difficult to push down negative content when it surfaces. "One client of mine had seven negative results on the first page of Google,"

Search Engine Optimization: Get More Traffic To Your Website

Search engine optimization techniques are vital to help your site rise above the hundreds of others you’ll be competing against. Search engines provide consumers with a means to shop for just about anything, read up on new companies and perform research. Your site is sure to start increasing in rankings if you decide to follow the great advice offered in the paragraphs below.

You should not have a separate page full of links. Blend them in with the other content on your page. Search engines often ignore link pages and readers have no interest in them. When you keep your content relevant to your text, it helps the search engines interpret the context more accurately, and it makes your information look more professional.

Make sure to have a good description tag to get your site’s search engine ranking up. The content in this area shouldn’t exceed 30 words. It is important that your description not take up more than 100 KB of data storage.

To raise your search engine rankings, keeping your content unique should be at the top of your list. A great way to generate more traffic onto your web site is to have unique content. Unique, informative content will net you repeat visitors.

If you are serious about improving your site’s rank, then you will want to implement web analytics from the start. You need to purchase and install analytics software in order to monitor the performance of your SEO tactics. When you see which methods are producing good results and which are not, you can adjust your strategy.

Keyword placement throughout your website is key for search engine optimization. Make frequent use of keywords toward the beginning of your content, but do not overdo it. The first paragraph of every page should feature the target keyword at least twice. After that, you want to place the keywords many times in the following 200 words, making sure that it flows nicely and it doesn’t seem overused.

Use a site map to help boost traffic to your website. This allows all of your pages to be linked together. This will boost your site traffic, as people will visit the links at the side.

Code your site well when trying to use SEO. If your site uses primarily JavaScript for content, for example, and the code is messy, the search engine spiders will be unable to index it. When your website contains a lot of Flash content with no text to describe it, search engines won’t see it at all.

A fully optimized site includes titles which focus on the most relevant keyword. You’re going to want the title tag available on all the pages that need it, so they can stay linked together. If you have a company name, put it at the end of the title link in order to connect them all together. Remember that people are not likely to search for your specific company name unless your name is well known and famous.

One vital SEO tip that you should remember is to keep an eye on your search standings at all times. Take a proactive approach, and find out how search engine optimization techniques are working for you. Monitor your results to learn if it is working or not. You can use either Alexa or Google toolbar to figure out your ranking.

Blogging is a great way to add more keyword rich content to your site, and improve your search engine ranking. Of course this leads to increased visitor numbers viewing your website.

Optimize your whole website, with emphasis on your target audience and your keywords. Always add relevant content that contains keywords; this includes articles. Insert your keywords across all aspects of your website so as to increase you SEO strategy.

While you can certainly improve your site’s search rank yourself, the best method may be to enlist the help of a company that specializes in search optimization. Having good SEO content is key to moving your site up in relevant search results. Many businesses offer great deals on these services.

Distinguish each page of your website completely from the rest. In particular, look closely at which titles you put there. These will be highly scrutinized by search engines and may influence your standing with them. Titles must contain your primary keyword if you wish your site to be highly ranked in search engine results.

Make sure you carefully research your options before outsourcing your website’s search engine optimization. Find an established company to handle your SEO. It is best to avoid the fly-by-night companies, even if their prices seem lower. Talk to former clients, look for testimonials and do your research. You will be happy you did.

For increased traffic from search engines, place your keywords strategically within the text and main body of your blog or website. It is important to pack your introductory content with keywords, but do not overdo it. Try to get your keyword into the first paragraph twice. Use the keyword frequently throughout the following 200 words. However, make sure that the text flows naturally and doesn’t sound contrived.

If your website is for a business, include the owner or CEO in contributing content. The CEO acts as the spokesperson for the entire company, and is someone whose thoughts people want to hear.

Don’t just make a wall of links on a page. It’s a good idea to keep links relevant to the content of the page. Link pages are not appreciated by readers or search engines. Making your content match your text helps search engines have an easier time indexing your site and makes your website look more professional.

There’s no big secret to search engine optimization, but you’re not going to be as successful as you should be without plenty of studying and research. The highest-ranking websites are those whose keyword content closely matches a search term; you can make your website one of them by employing keywords properly. The most effective ways to use keywords are covered in this article.

How the New Google+ Local Tab Could Influence Local SEO

For local-business owners, the results of Google’s new Google+ Local tab will go well beyond the social network‘s increased social features. All the data compiled under the new tab — which is dedicated to providing information and ratings on local businesses — will be indexed by Google. The new Google+ Local pages will give businesses a better opportunity to be ranked in the search results, as well as the ability to harness social proof from their customers to drive internal Google+ recommendations and future business.

But to do so you’ll need to do more than simply sign up for a Google Places for Business listing. There are specific actions to take in order to maximize the local search engine optimization (SEO) benefits of the new Google+ Local for your website. Here’s a few to consider:

• Claim both your old Google Pages listing (if you haven’t already) and your new Google+ Local page. Google+ Local listings are essentially replacing the old Pages listings. Because the transition hasn’t rolled out to all users yet, participating on both sites until the shift occurs can help insure that your online presence remains consistent.

• Link to your new Google+ Local page from your website. Doing so can get the ball rolling, conferring both a local SEO benefit to your business’s website, as well as the social boost you’ll secure by exposing your existing customers to your new Google+ Local web presence.

• Set up your Google+ account. Again, if you haven’t already done so, now’s the time to get active on Google’s social network. Set up your own personal profile, begin adding friends, family members and customers to your circles, and start sharing content on the site.

One of the biggest benefits to this transition will be the enhanced social sharing features available within the Google+ platform. You can only take advantage of this if you’re active on the network.

• Contact all Gmail users on your email lists. Filter your email marketing list to create a sub-list of subscribers with Gmail accounts, and then send this group a message informing readers of your new Google+ Local page. Politely request that they “+1” your page or add you to their circles, as social signals like these are playing a larger role in SEO than ever.

• Move forward with traditional local SEO best practices. As of now, it doesn’t appear that this interface update has significantly impacted the organization of the search engine results pages. So while it’s important to undertake the actions described above to maximize your local SEO benefits, it’s also a good idea to press forward with any existing marketing campaigns that follow current industry best practices.

Most algorithm changes of Google are going against the technical SEO people that abused ranking factors

• Content Aggregation Scripts and Content Scraping ScriptsMajor source of duplicate content online. Often pestered with a variety of ads.

• Content Spinning ScriptsSometimes created as standalone desktop applications, sometimes as web-based applications with APIs, sometimes as CMS plugins, add-ons, extensions, or modules. Made to combat duplicate content issues, but often end up having bad grammar and low quality content.

• Article Directory ScriptsArticle directories used to be repositories of articles that you can search and find articles free to use for your own magazine or news website, online and offline. The benefit the author gets is simply recognition. Until the article directories started ranking themselves and spammers came in and just made their own article directories.

• Web Directory ScriptsOnline web directories are currently not as powerful as they were before. Probably the ones that still work are the ones for geographic location and are official citation sources. But everything else running the common opensource directory scripts, and are obviously made for links alone no long work.

• Submission ApplicationsMay be in the form of desktop applications, or a web-based tool, tool to submit to various places, from article directories, website directories, forum posting, blog commenting, social bookmarking and many more. In most cases, these postings can look as spammy as hell. Not because of the software, but how users were using it.

• Multiple Blog Administration SystemsCommon CMS plugins to manage sites multiple number of sites for blog networks. SEO using this technique just makes a network of blogs made for links alone. They use the multiple administration system to manage the blogs easier.

• Templates and Widget LinksAlmost every CMS has a template system, and in each one has the opportunity to display or even hide a link. Same is true with widgets on a CMS platform. Often disguised as a free theme or tool, to bait people to install it.

Shift in SEO Knowledge & Experience: Priorities in a Post-Penguin and Post …

SEO Core Knowledge

After playing around in the SEO space since 2004, and officially as a career (moving away from web design development ) in 2006, which eventually led me to climbed the corporate ladder from company to company as an SEO specialist, SEO engineer, to currently, the SEO Director at Internet Marketing Inc., I have seen a change in the focus of skills and talent when searching for new candidates of people to work with, in finding the right outsourced vendors and other partners where it was way different back in the day, and for sure it was also way different before I was active in the SEO space.

1 – Marketing Background: These people either had a related undergraduate degree or had jobs going into this direction. Knowledge and experience in this area helps SEO because it is the marketing people that know how to promote a product, reach people, make a buzz, creating things that would help out in the overall awareness of the product, with or without SEO. But since they know how to call the attention of the people for their target market, it is these same people that you reach out to online, and if you target them well, eventually their work is what gets users linking to your sites naturally which helps out in the overall search engine ranking.



2 – Writing Background: These people that are trained so well in writing and concentrate mainly on pleasing the readers, the actual website users and not search engines. The best writers are not really looking at keyword count, or keyword density as the main factor that dictates how they write. Writers make content compelling to users, makes them more interested in reading. They persuade users to take a certain action. They get the main point across in the simplest of words and always using the main words needed to rank well at the same time in a very natural sounding tone. Writers that make great content that people love also makes users pass these around online in whatever way, social media, email, instant messaging and other various way, eventually linking to them naturally and driving other people to link to them naturally.


3 – Technical Background: Almost 99 percent of the times what we are trying to rank are web pages. And there is a lot technology that goes into webpage creation.
The Design: Use of graphic software, and frontend development in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In more advanced cases, some sites run on Adobe Flash or AJAX.

Server Side Programming: The backend development can run on a variety of scripting languages such as PHP, ASP or .Net, JSP, Perl, Phyton, Cold Fusion and more.

Databases:  Often these server-side scripting is tied to a database specific database. Some examples of these would be MySQL, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase and more!

Common CMS’: Instead of programming from scratch in a server-side language and database, many times you can simply use a CMS and customize it. There are many popular CMS’ such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or some that are more for online shopping like Magento, OS Commerce, ZenCart, Cube Cart, xCart, etc.

Server Configurations: All websites are hosted on a server. And servers can cause SEO issues such as problems with 301 redirects, error 404s, or challenges in URL rewriting where the implementation of these differ depending on the platform. Configurations on Windows running IIS would be different from running Linux running Apache.

Domain Names: For international campaigns you have to deal with a variety of Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD)
Mobile SEO: On any mobile website, it is better to auto detect web browser device using user agent detection to properly display the website depending on the user agent.

Leveraging The Brand-Building Powers Of SEO

When marketers consider branding, search engine optimization typically doesn’t come to mind. SEO has long been used as a vehicle for driving highly qualified visitors to brands’ Web
sites. But SEO is no longer just about driving traffic; it’s about building brand value and customer affinity.

There is often a power struggle within organizations as to how advertising
dollars should be spent on branding versus SEO. Rather than fighting that tug of war for SEO budget, marketers can position SEO as part of their overall branding effort rather than a silo marketing
channel.

Marketers’ requests for investment in SEO are made easier when they make the case for SEO’s brand- and online reputation-enhancing qualities.




Assess The
Current State Of The Brand

How marketers proceed with their organic-branding efforts depends on the type of brand they are working with. An SEO branding strategy for a recognizable
brand will be different than one for a challenger brand that does not yet have a strong presence in the marketplace.

Marketers working with recognizable brands should focus their SEO branding
efforts on maintaining positive sentiment around the brand. If the brand is not well-known, time and resources will be best spent building visibility through increased non-branded keyword
rankings.

Identify Sentiment Issues

In order to identify brand sentiment issues, it’s important to first understand what people are searching for, both about and
around the brand. To identify those branded search queries, type the brand name into a Google search and note the autocomplete search suggestions.

Input those suggestions into a keyword
suggestion/research tool, such as Google’s. This will provide a list of popular search phrases around the brand.

Once the most
popular branded search queries have been identified, it’s time to check the sentiment around those phrases. Perform several manual searches for those keywords and review the search engine
results to assess the brand sentiment.





Measure The Results

Traditional SEO results are fairly simple to measure. Marketers can track keyword rankings, traffic and
conversions over time with hard numbers. When assessing the branding value of SEO efforts, the results are not quite as black and white. There are, however, some hard numbers marketers should analyze
to see the brand effect.


An easy way to demonstrate the increase in brand awareness from an SEO branding campaign is to track the search volume of branded keywords using the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool. Set a baseline of the monthly search volume around the branded keywords and track the changes over time. An
increase in branded organic traffic and direct traffic should be present in the site analytics.

In order to track improvements from SEO in a brand’s reputation, analyze the conversion
rates of the branded keywords via analytics or paid search data.

As consumers begin to see the positive sentiment being built around a brand and begin to trust that brand more, they will be
much more likely to perform an action on the brand’s site. An increase in branded conversion rates is a good way to show the value of organic branding efforts.

Why You Need To Be Using Keyword Matrices

Think of this scenario:

You manage an eCommerce website that sells high-end camera’s and camera equipment.

Two visitors come into your site using the search term “SLR camera accessories,” they both searched Google using the same body term with commercial intent.

They are both looking for the exact same product, a Noktor 50mm lens, but here’s where it gets interesting, and where alignment between keywords and your content becomes critical to conversion – one visitors click’s into the category “SLR Accessories,” while the other clicks into “SLR Lens.”

Do they both find the Noktor 50mm lens they’re looking for?

It depends on if you have listed the product in all of the intent-based locations where it’s relevant.

The separation is between product versus function, one user is looking for a product specific attribute, a lens, where the other is looking for a functional attribute, an accessory.

Keyword research is one of the first places to find consumer pain points – by nature, they are looking for answers to their questions. So, it’s a great place to do research. But finding the keyword is not enough – you must also do a competitive analysis to determine whether or not your solution can be the best, or the cost-benefit may not be worth it.

For example, we built a marketing checklist and did comparative research: are there any other checklists out there? Do they compare to our proposed solution? What competitive advantages do they have? After determining we could create by far the best solution (not a requirement), we moved forward in building it.

In the scenario above it’s not as much about the pain points as it is how different brains approach solving the same problem, and how content needs to be structured as a path toward a solution, regardless of which path is taken.

How to Build a Keyword Matrix

Initial keyword research is the first step toward building an informative keyword matrix.

So fire up keyword snatcher (or whatever keyword mining tool you fancy), drop in your head term (just one), and send it off to the races. The Excel file is designed to handle *any* keyword data, as it uses a natural language macro to look for signaling words (that you can manage in the key) to tag searcher intent.

Export to CSV > Filter out illegal characters > cut into lists of 10,000 keywords > Save CSV.

Upload into Google Keyword Planner > Get Ideas > Export to CSV.

Use keyword combiner to join all of your individual research files.

Open in Excel > Sort descending by search volume > Add a column for intent > Add a column for “Best” > Save.





Tagging For Intent


Tagging for search intent is critical, this is where effective prioritization starts to really come into focus. Here is how I approach tagging for the 4 top-level buckets of user intent:

Informational – a specific question where the results are the information the searcher is looking for, may contain phrases such as:  info, more information, details, features, benefits, etc.


Navigational – contains the name of the brand, product, service, or a person at the organization.


Commercial Investigation – easiest to identify and least ambiguous, these queries contain specific parameters for researching a purchase, such as sizes, colors, versus, best, price, pricing, etc.


Transactional -indicative of shopping behavior further down the conversion funnel, at this point the searcher knows what they want – so look for terms like buy, purchase, sale, coupon, discount, or locations.

How To Build a Keyword Matrix and Why You Need One

So, What is a Keyword Matrix?

Unlike the virtual world built by the Wachowski brothers, the idea is relatively simple, a matrix is a 2-dimensional table that enables you to cross reference two aspects, and analyze opportunities – with the potential to slice and layer additional information on top for deeper analysis.

When applied to keywords, it gives you 2 axises from which to gauge different qualitative heuristics.

Michael Martinez discusses passive versus active keyword matrices, putting the emphasis on purpose; a passive matrix records keyword data that other websites are using, where as an active matrix is used as a design template for your website and content.

I am going to be taking a different approach to defining and building keyword matrices for organic search.

I want to look at search intent versus search volume and search volume versus SERP competitiveness. These 2 scenarios are very interesting because the first is an inverse relationship, and the latter is linear.



Query complexity tends to also have an inverse relationship with search volume; as complexity decreases (from long-tail to head), search volume tends to increase.

In the graph above you can see how search volume steadily decreases as intent increases (thus the inverse relationship), and again, it is usually the case that the query length (and complexity) increase in relation to intent.

Do You Deserve A First Page Ranking?

Does your content really deserve to rank on page one for your target keywords? Is it one of the 10 best, most informative, most useful pieces of content on the internet?

If not, the answer is probably no.

You Need to Be Worthy of Ranking


The idea behind this concept is that the game has changed for the better. It’s no longer about gaming the system, it’s about being worthy of the attention that top rankings in a competitive industry will bring you.

Companies Websites ranking on page one who are not among the best in their niche are squandering an opportunity that would be better served by their competitors. If you are getting the right traffic but can’t make the conversion, you don’t deserve that ranking.

Furthermore, it is not good enough to think you are the best or say you will be. In order for this approach to take shape and drive results,  this commitment must flow through your organization from the top down. It is a mindset that must be accepted by every person on your team and they need to believe in it.

Part of this mentality is developing a culture of testing and constant improvement; where any day you are not getting better you are getting worse.




Current State of The SERP’s


I wanted to go out and take a look at the first page of Google across a variety of vertical markets to see if after the Zoo Updates, only the best, most rank-worthy websites are holding the top spots.

I picked a variety of large, very competitive markets, to see how the big brands stack up against other websites competing in their space.

The verticals I’m looking at are women’s fashion, children’s products, technology hardware, software, and then some of the less savory verticals like credit cards, car insurance, and payday loans.

Advanced SEO For Ecommerce: Maximizing Keyword Spread

Maximizing the search engine visibility of your eCommerce website, for qualified queries, is perhaps the most important role SEO has to play in selling products online.

The idea of keyword spread is similar to an approach taken by stock options traders called a condor option; you are essentially increasing your keyword opportunities while lowering your overall risk.


By spreading your search engine rankings for as many qualified keywords as possible you are exponentially increasing the probability that your site will be seen and hopefully visited.

And to be fair (and clear) this strategy is not just for eCommerce, but for the purposes of this post I am going to focus on selling online, looking at websites that are effectively ranking for eCommerce intent keywords from head to long tail.

The nuts and bolts of this concept is about making sure you position the right content, for the right time, for the right person. If you’re taking a strategic approach to keyword spread, then your visitors are getting the right page at the right point in the conversion funnel, based on their search behavior and intent.

Think of this as more of a keyword funnel where the top of the funnel is informational and navigational-based content; content that helps to inform the visitor, present them with facts, data, and options but does NOT pitch them.

You are then ranking content at the commercial investigation phase, helping users to quickly gain insights into how your product stacks up against your competitors, the pro’s and con’s (yes! The con’s too, I’ll come back to this later in the post), pricing information and availability.

The end game here is to take the Google approach to information experience; provide as much as possible as quick as possible so users don’t have to look anywhere else.

I realize this is counter-intuitive from an eCommerce perspective, why would you ever want to provide competitive information to a prospective customer?

Simple, if you provide them with all the information they need, not only are you building trust through transparency, but they have no reason to go looking elsewhere for it.



Keyword Spread Opportunity

Taking a lesson from my days in Finance, you can lower your risk for negative returns from search by making sure to spread your rankings across more purchase-intent SERP’s. Similar to a condor option, the wider your spread on target traffic, and the higher your average position, the less risk you have on not making your target return.

You need to be building awareness and mind-share throughout the buying cycle.

Searcher behavior starts with initial interest and information gathering. As shoppers begin to browse more specific queries they move through the conversion funnel.

Making Sense of All This Keyword Data

So with some simple Excel sorting this offers me an at-a-glance snapshot of the both the upper and lower maximum’s in terms of overall SERP competition.

The keyword opportunity model I talk about in my SEO competitive analysis post explains the idea of taking a macro approach to dissecting SERP’s at the keyword level, which in my opinion, is necessary for enterprise SEO and growing websites to over 100,000 visitors per month.

The macro approach to keyword research is necessary for content heavy websites (and optimizing for traffic), but not ideal when doing intent-focused keyword research, as would be the case for Ecommerce, software, or other scenarios where some keyword phrases are going to carry significantly more qualification.

Researching for Searcher Intent


When optimizing for conversion, it is critical to gain some perspective into the psychographics of your target audience, and also understand the most common segments of search intent. While all 4 of the most common segments offer opportunities for conversion, only 2 are of truly high value and worth targeting; commercial investigation and transactional queries.

The best way to get a handle on all this data is to group and categorize your keywords to look at the potential stage of the conversion funnel the searcher is within. By segmenting your keywords into funnels you can begin to paint a picture with your data that allows you to disseminate search intent.

Taking this even a step further, you can begin to understand keywords as they relate to search context. Where even something as simple as word order can play a crucial role when defining the meaning behind the query and ensuring you are selecting the right keywords to target.




Time to Do The Research


You can’t build the right house without the right tools, and search engine driven websites are no different.

The good news is at this point in time SEO has been around long enough that there is a whole slew of great tools you can use to assist you with your research efforts.

Tools run the gamut in functionality from pulling search volume, to providing related suggestions, to competition in AdWords, and many other helpful bits of information.




Don’t Forget to Check Plurals


One of the most common mistakes when doing keyword research is forgetting to run the numbers for both the singular and plurals versions of your terms.

I have found that often times one is significantly higher than the other, and quite often the plural version is indicative of commercial intent.

Take for example SEO versus SEO Services, the former is an informational query where the intent is most likely research or information gathering. The latter, SEO Services, is a transactional or commercial investigation phrase indicative of being further in the purchasing funnel.




Create Keyword Evaluation Model


Evaluating keywords for relative opportunities is still very tough.

Without massive stores of data and detailed insights into the competitive landscape it is easy to throw a  lot of time and money at targeting keywords that will never deliver a stable return.

In order to avoid this and instead focus only where there is rank to be had and money to be made, I believe it’s best to use an evaluation method.

There are a number of methodologies ranging from complex formulas including many different heuristics to more simplified models designed just to give you a sense of the opportunity.

I have developed a simple keyword opportunity model to help with this process, but for this post I am going to use a  simplified version.

This is meant to be more of a barometer than anything else and this data should not be used to make a business case, but more so just to give you a sense of opportunity.

I’m going to use keyword competitiveness scoring from SerpIQ, but you could also do this with SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty score or something similar.




Keyword Research for Page Titles


Optimizing page titles for search is best done finding a balance between volume and intent.

Bringing this back to the 2 schools of thought, your title keyword composition is going to depend on your goals;

If optimizing for traffic you want to find combinations to maximize use of high search volume terms.
If optimizing for conversion you want to pay attention to intent instead of search volume.
In both scenarios I recommend looking for creative ways to combine exact match phrases to leverage strings of keywords that contain several target keywords but are not awkward or stuffed.