Manage Your Online Reputation Using SEO
Step 1: See Where You Stand
Before you can manage your online reputation, you have to assess it. Type your names in search engines. Set up search alerts for your name (Google recently made this easier to do from the Google dashboard through a new "Me on the Web" tool).
If you find something unflattering, ask yourself:
- Did I post it? If, for instance, photos from your Flickr account that you'd rather keep private are showing up in search results for your name, you can simply delete the photos or adjust your privacy settings.After you've removed the offensive content, you can use Google's URL removal tool to stop it from appearing as a cached copy or snippet in search results. If you do nothing, the content will still eventually drop from Google's index — it will just take a bit longer to disappear.
- Is it personal information that could be used in a crime? If someone posts your social security number, bank account number, credit card number or an image of your handwritten signature, Google will make efforts to remove it from search results. It will also contact the site's hosting company to request that the page be taken down.
- Is it posted on a high-traffic news site? Competing for search results with a popular news site is difficult. But Patrick Ambron, the cofounder of a personal online reputation management service called Brand-Yourself, says that all hope is not lost. "Google usually only likes to rank one result per domain name per page," he says. "So if you could get another result on the same domain name like Huffington Post that was better optimized for your name, you could theoretically knock the bad article off." One way to do this is to create a profile on that news site using your full name. Use as many links as possible, and link to the profile from all of your other web properties.
If you can't answer "yes" to either of these questions, your best bet for reducing the visibility of negative content is to compete for top search results using positive content.
Step 2: Post Positive Content
"If you can't get the content removed from the original site, you probably won't be able to completely remove it from Google's search results, either," reads Google's guide to keeping personal information out of Google. "Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business."
In other words, if you want to make negative webpages appear lower in search, you'll need to create content of relevance to push the negative links down. Google suggests responding to negative reviews of your business, for instance.
Profiles on social networks are powerful tools for this purpose, as results from large sites likeFacebook and Twitter often carry more SEO power than a single post on something like a personal blog.
Step 3. Create an Identity Hub
One secret to pushing your positive online presence further up in search results is to make a hub that links to all of your content. Ambron recommends these tips for pushing your hub to the top of search results for your name.
source: mashable.
Categories:
advance seo techniques,
Online Marketing
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