You may have heard the term ‘reputation management’ or even been contacted by a company that offers this service. But what is it and do you need to know about it?

If you look up the name of your business in a search engine, you will find a page full of links. Many will be from your site, maybe someone who has linked to you. But if your unlucky then you may find a review site, forum, complaint site or someone’s blog giving your company a bad reputation.

Example: Lets say your company is called Joe Blogs Windows. You may find that on page 1 of the search engines, a review is screaming out words to the effect of, “Joe Blogs ripped me off, has shoddy workmanship and i will never use them again.” Pretty bad for the reputation of your business, right?

So to break this down, reputation management is Watching what people are saying about you and Controlling what searchers see, specifically negative comment removal.

If you can achieve this, then you will keep your reputation onlinetion. If comments can not be removed then you need to deal with the problem and thereby limit any damage.

Now the big problem is that the internet is pretty much enregulated. Anyone can slag you off and removing stuff from the web is no easy task. Your reputation can make or break you and the internet is where a big portion of your customers will first will find out about you.

So you type in your company name and find one or more less than complimentary reviews of your business. This is when a reputation management company comes to the rescue. Or you can get to work yourself.

What to do if you have been bad mouthed on the web

What you or your hired company need to do is simple. Try to remove any bad comments using a variety of methods. Determine if it was made by a competitor, maybe an ex-employee or a non-real person. Is the comment true or is it a lie? If it is, then you can contact the website carrying the offending comments and ask for it to be removed.

If the comment was made by a real customer with a grievance then contact said customer and try to appease or help them. The review may have been made in haste or in the heat of the moment. Many people are willing to login and amend or remove the offending message with a little persuasion.

The best method i think, is to start generating good reviews of your business which will remove bad ones further down the pages. You can achieve this by contacting happy customers and asking them to post a review on any number of directories such as Freeindex or Yell etc.

As an seo company, we can help to regain your reputation and help remove the bad ones from searchers eyes. Or if you have the time and knowledge you can achieve this yourself. But if you have’nt already, then i suggest you do a quick search for your company and make sure nobody has achieved page one by slating your business.

When your happy with your reputation, you just have to keep monitoring and dealing with any problems straight away. If you have a few bad reviews that cannot be removed, then don’t worry too much. Most companies have both good and bad comments made about them, just make sure the good ones get seen first.

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I get a lot of phone calls and emails all pretty much of a similar tone. They all ask if they could do all this seo work themselves and save money? Are seo companies just a rip-off? Do they just resell linkbuilding methods that they buy for $20 off of an online forum?

The answer to all these questions is yes. Can you do the seo work yourself? Definately. But although buying a few article blasts, web2.0 creations, directory submissions etc. may all help increase backlinks. They may have zero effect on your rankings or make a dent in your traffic stats. And this is because seo has become a little more sophisticated these days.

If you can create the right links at the right time and using the correct variety of anchor texts, then you can do it yourself. The problem is that most business owners do not have this knowledge, so maybe using a good seo company is worth doing in this case.

As to the question,  are seo companies just a rip-off? Well that is another yes, but only some. You see starting an seo company is as easy as knocking up a quick website and then becoming a reseller for all these low cost linkbuilding services that are floating around. If an seo company is set up this way then you may as well spend an hour doing it yourself and save on their markup. To find out if an seo company is real, do a little researc. How long have they been in business? Can they show some real results? Does their own website have good rankings for multiple keywords?

If you can get answers to all these questions then ask them what they will do if you hand over your hard earned cash. You would expect at the very least the following:-

Competitor analysis
Market niche analysis
A timetable and strategy of what they will do for you
Onpage checking and possible modification
Varied and timed link building
Content creation
At least monthly report
A contract that can be cancelled at any time.

If an seo company cannot (or will not) offer this then walk away and find another one. There seem to be hundreds around anyways!

So in summary, link building is easy and can be cheap. Unfortunately you will not kid search engines with these kind of practises anymore. A little more sophistication and effort will be required. The good news is that there are companies (us included) that have been around for a long time, have proven results and can offer cost effective and worthwhile results.

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You must have heard by now about the Google plus or Google+ social networking site from the big G. Already the network has more than 20 million users and is quickly becoming a serious competitor of social media giants Facebook and Twitter.  So how does Google+ factor in to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

One of the ways Google+ separates itself from the social media pack is its power to affect SEO. Google+ has something up their sleeve that the likes of Facebook and Twitter can’t compete with—Google+ links are dofollow links that carry PageRank and authority that Facebook and Twitter do not.

So any links you happen to share on social networks – Facebook and Twitter, are NoFollow links, in other words not so important for SEO ranking.

Two main areas where you can currently add links are in the Google+ posts and the “About Me” section.  The Google+ posts will give you a short term boost where you can post your latest news.

The ‘About Me’ area is a good place to talk about your business and drop a few links back to your website or blog. The links here will not change so become a more solid link with longer staying power.

So although we are all busy beavers, jump aboard Google+ for an seo boost.

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You may have heard from the grapevine about Google’s new algorithm changes that hit the US in February and the UK just last week. So what do they mean for your seo projects and more importantly, your website rankings?

The changes which are also known as the Panda update have affected websites in different ways, some gained rankings whilst others fell away to page umpteen oblivion. If your site saw a tumble then there is no point complaining about it. Google have a habit of not changing their minds.

The changes all boil down to one thing and that is quality. Many link farms, low quality sites with tons of copied content all bit the dust. But then so did established sites like Ezinearticles.com lost position as well.

Shallow sites that carry dubious content and allow anyone to publish anything have been hit. Some web2.0 properties that many use for seo have also suffered. Sites have basically been told to stop publishing low quality, small crap articles designed just to get search engine rankings.

It appears that sites such as those mentioned above also got hit because they allowed users to promote bad stuff such as pharmaceuticals, gambling etc. This has had an effect on the whole website which has got a good slapping.

It appears that low quality was hit but also the length (number of words) in the website content was also a factor. Is it a coincidence that Ezine are now upping the maximum word count for articles submitted?

So what can you do to achieve good rankings and avoid wasting your time? Well for a start write good quality content and post it on your own website or blog. Then post to select article and web2.0 sites that are still in vogue. Look at the length of the post, number of paragraphs etc. Add social networking features so your content gets tweeted on Twitter and liked on Facebook.

If you have a blog then people should be comenting on your posts. Are you linking out to other quality sites?

When it comes to backlinks then just make sure you diversify. If a particular area like article pages are suffering then your links from a Press Release may still be strong. For most people, this update will have no effect whatsoever and for the rest? Well they probably got what they deserved.

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Some of you who have been around for a while may have heard of LSI or latent semantic indexing. Search engines have a method for sorting websites into the correct category and ranking for the right search terms. LSI is one way they achieve this aim, and if you know how to use it, then it can improve your websites position in the serps.

So in a nutshell, latent semantic indexing is how the search engines associate words that are all similar or related to a certain topic. As an example, your website may be about plumbing. Google knows that the page should also contain related words, such as boilers, leaks, bathrooms, 24 hour callout, repair leaks etc.

This lets the search engines know what your subject is and how to organise the search terms. It knows that all the related words are refering to plumbing matters and not shopping or anything else. Once you have a list of related words and phrases, put them on pages of your website.

To find these related words pop over to the Google keyword tool and find all the related words the search engine finds relevant to the term. Then just use the words and phrases from your list to write or rewrite your content.

So instead of using traditional keyword percentages and density, use related phrases. Increasingly search engines are including LSI into search algorithms to evaluate your website pages better. And many experts now say that sites optimised for keywords can even rank lower as they are falsely over optimised.

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A common mistake made by business owners is to go out and get as many backlinks as possible, possibly by using a bad seo company. Based on the assumption that more links equals better rankings. Of course life in the seo world is never that easy or straight forward.

Many of the links are from suspect websites and pages. Ordering 5000 directory submissions may sound good, but when you find that the sites linking to you also link to pharmaceutical and porn neighbourhoods, then you may well wish you had never gone down that route.

The problem with removing a link is the same as getting a good one. It is hard work and many times downright impossible.

So whats a business owner to do? Simply forget about the bad links and start getting some good ones instead. The search engines rank a site based on many factors, and some crappy links will do no harm if you have more good quality links. So get building bigger and better.

Making use of our seo services is a good start, as every link we produce will help your website to rank higher and make the ratio of good to bad links higher.

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I had a customer of mine email this week, and the email went along the lines of this:-

” I keep getting emails from companies saying that my websites are not SEO’d copied some text from one below any comments?”

I was surfing through your website and realized that despite having a good design; it was not ranking on any of the search engines for most of the keywords pertaining to your domain.

I was wondering if you would be interested in getting the SEO done for your website.

My answer was quite simple and went along the lines of – “As for seo companies getting in touch.If the site is not seo’d, how did they find it in the first place??” He wrote back agreeing with me that if his website was not correctly seo’d then how the hell did they find it to email him?

Now i would never in a million years, send out an email trying to get seo business, but obviously many do.

If an SEO company contacts you with an email without you enquiring first, be careful of what they are offering. Any SEO company worth its salt will not resort to spamming in order to get customers. Companies which are good at SEO will have customers coming to them.

So in a nutshell, you find the seo company thats right for you and not the other way round. K4XHTKN7S283

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Hi and welcome to a new feature we have. I get so many questions asked that im starting a new category called :- Search Engine and SEO Question

So lets start off with this question i received:- How do i get my website higher up the search engines?

Now every website has to be judged on its own merits before i devise a linking plan, however lets assume your website has the correct onsite seo work done and your languishing on page four or five. Some general advice would be to get some backlinks to your website.

Well for general advice then..

* Try not to get too many spammy links. By this i mean links that can be posted easily and without moderation. Your links will sit on the same page as Viagra pills and gambling/porn sites. Spend a little more effort working on link building

* Contact trusted, authority sites. You may not be able to get a link from thebbc.co.uk, cnn.com etc. But how about finding the website that do have a link from these trusted sites and ask them to link to you. One link away is great, two is good and so on.

* If your website has mainly 1 type of links (directories for example) then vary it a little A diverse link profile is a much more effective one. Use video and articles and press releases etc.

To find out who is linking to your website and your competition as well, see our Easy Way to check your links

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