How To Manage Your Online Reputation

Do you need help monitoring your reputation? Want to know what bloggers think about you? Fear no more…Just have a photo taken with the Master Abe “Yuga” Olandres dressed for the first time ever in business suit and you’re all good. Haha. Kidding aside, you should have been at the recently concluded Search Engine Marketing Conference 2007 (SEMCON) and listened to Abe talk about Tracking Buzz: How to Manage Your Online Reputation– Do you need help monitoring your reputation? Want to know what bloggers think about your business and your products? When you undertake a search for your company name or brand is negative information relating to your company showing up in the search results? Is your company and brand reputation being adversely affected by these negative high ranking results? Protect and enhance your business by controlling how your name and brand appear online and in search results.

I thought at first that Abe was going to talk about “managing one’s online reputation” and I remembered that this was a conference basically for marketing companies. But there was a thing or two I learned about online reputation. Everything begins offline and that applies to you and me as an individual . A blogger once argued with me that I was trying to “save my reputation” due to some controversial issue I blogged about, hence my defensive stance. How is reputation defined anyway?

American Heritage Dictionary defines reputation as:

1. The general estimation in which a person is held by the public.
2. The state or situation of being held in high esteem.
3. A specific characteristic or trait ascribed to a person or thing: a reputation for courtesy.

Is reputation more important than my character? Yes, that blogger might have perceived me to have a low reputation in the eyes of the blogging community. I don’t need to save or manage my online reputation. If my character was shaky to start with, then my reputation is definitely at stake. Sometimes my actions may be perceived to be very unpopular to this particular blogger but it’s the price to pay for making a stand. And I did stand by it no matter how unpopular it was.

Anyway…What was I doing in the SEMCON anyway? In 2003, I first came across the word “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). I was so fascinated with SEO because Lauren and I just started a webhosting business and wanted to rank well with the keyword “webhosting plans” . After scouring SEO forums, we came up with a list of tips and techniques which we wrote in Google Search Engine Optimization 101. After following those guidelines, our small webhosting business started to rank quite well with the desired keywords which in turn translated to sale conversions. Today, our webhosting site has Google Page Rank 6 and continues to gain customers on a daily basis.

Anyway to make the story short, I haven’t updated myself with search engine optimization tips and techniques the past years. I’ve applied the little SEO knowledge I have with my blogs and so far they are working well. Still, there is room for improvement. Attending the SEMCON gave me further knowledge on how to continue to rank well in the Search Engine Results Pages. Of course, you and I want to build traffic to our sites for various reasons. Allow me to share 3 SEO tips which are basically common sense tips:

1. Write good appropriate content, and lots of it.

2. Use appropriate titles to help get the attention of the user when they see you in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

3. Use internal and external linking.

– Internal linking works best by linking past entries to current entries.

– Without quality content, you won’t get external links, but you can get good ranking without links if you have good content.

So was the SEMCON helpful? Yes and No. Yes, I especially liked Aaron Wall’s keynote speech, Ben Arriola’s “SEO for Megasites, Jayvee Fernandez “Effective Web Copywriting”, Elymar Alpao ” Link Building Tactics, Tool & Techniques”, Rhiza Sanchez”, “Advanced Link Building Strategies”. Yes, I learned that one needs to have good quality content combined with quality links. A lot of the SEO techniques I mastered in the past seem outdated already and new tips and techniques were learned in this conference. No, I didn’t have to pose with Abe to get a good reputation. Yes, all I needed to do was affirm the strategies on “How to Manage Your Online Reputation”.

Do you think that a business’ or even your online reputation is critical to you?

View photos of the SEMCON 2007. Special mention to Andrew de la Serna (The Ratified guru) who flew all the way from Davao to attend the conference and be together with the Manila based bloggers.