You have worked very hard to create your website and/or blog, and you have probably spent a fair amount of time creating personas in the world of social media. You have built up some regular traffic, and you find the Internet is a friendly place after all. Then something unexpected happens… a negative comment on somebody else’s site.

Perhaps it’s a negative review on a business site such as Yelp or Google Business Directory. Or perhaps somebody doesn’t care for the way you’ve written a blog post, and they have expressed their dislike on their own blog. It could even be that you had one too many at a friend’s party, and that said friend has posted photos of you on Flickr.

Whatever the negative information is, what can you do about it now? Your online presence has been tarnished, and you need to polish it back up. In these cases it’s unfortunate that the nature of the Internet is to be a gigantic database for online activities. While you may convince your friend to take down the pictures, and you might negotiate with that unhappy client and get them to change their review, the fact is, once something is posted online, it’s likely to remain available through the Wayback Machine, Google cached records, or somebody other site’s catalog of online content.

SEO is your best defense

A targeted SEO campaign is your best counterattack when your online reputation has gone south. While you may not be able to erase the content, you can bury it in the search results by creating opposing content that will rank higher. This is done with a combination of content generation on your website as well as content aggregators such as Squidoo or EzineArticles.

Once you generate the opposing content, then you use link-building strategies to increase the page ranking to bring your content up in the search results, and bury the negative content you have found. At Landau Design we teach a Do-it-Yourself SEO class that assists you in creating an SEO strategy to bolster your online presence. Our next class begins July 14, 2010. Find out more >

How do you know if there are negative comments out there?

You should research your online presence every month. You should keep a log of what you find so you know when something new appears. We believe your online presence is your gold card on the Internet, and if it gets tarnished, it can harm your business. We have created a free PDF to show you how to research your online presence.

Technorati tags: seo buzz, blog carnival.

When people are growing their web presence they often focus on SEO (search engine optimization) to the exclusion of all else. The fact is, SEO is only one component of an online marketing strategy, and often what you do in an online marketing campaign can effect your SEO results.

What is SEO (search engine optimization)?

According to Wikipedia, SEO is: the practice of maximizing the volume or quality of traffic to a web site (such as a blog) from search enginessearch results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (“SEM”) which may deal with paid inclusion. via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”)

In other words, SEO is what you do to come up on page 1 of Google. It is essentially the technical site of online marketing. SEO is primarily focused in 3 areas:

1. Content generation on your site or other sites.
2. Gaining as many links INTO your site as possible.
3. Optimizing your website for keywords chosen.

What is Online Marketing?

According to YourDictionary.com: In its simplest form, the term online marketing refers to using the power of Internet advertising to generate a response from your audience.

So Online marketing ecompasses all things you do to gain customers through your website or blog. This could include:

• Social media
• SEO
• Banner advertising
• Print advertising
• Press releases
• Article marketing
• Creating a blog to compliment your website
• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• Video marketing

Online marketing is the process of turning your web presence into a salesman that never sleeps. It incorporates traditional marketing as well as online marketing, and the end goal is to increase the traffic to your website.

Do I have to do both?

The short answer is yes. If you want to maximize incoming traffic to your website, then SEO and other online marketing techniques are both required. But research shows that 47% of potential customers are going to the search engines to find online businesses, and with those numbers, ranking high in the search engines is a critical component of gaining online eyeballs. So if you do nothing else, focusing on SEO will gain you incoming traffic can help you gain half the market share for your niche.

SEO Webinars

Landau Design has SEO webinars to teach you how to do SEO on your own. Join us and find out how you can create a dramatic increase in website traffic in just 3 months:

• Why is SEO Critical to Online Success?
• Do-it-Yourself SEO, Part 1 (essential tips & techniques)
• Do-it-Yourself SEO, Part 2 (more tips and techniques)

We have been working to promote our SEO and social media summer school classes for Landau Design, and in the process we have gathered tools to help us get the word out. We thought we would share these tools since we are certain they would be useful in helping you promote your webinars.

General online event sites

• upcoming.yahoo.com
• garysguide.org
• events.org
• eventsetter.com
• eventbrite.com

Webinar listing sites

• webinarlistings.com
• freeteleseminarlist.com
• devtownstation.com
• webinarhero.com
• webinarbase.com
• eventspan.com
• teleseminarlive.com
• webinarboxoffice.com

Social networking sites

• LinkedIn Event Listings
• Facebook Event Listings

Don’t miss our upcoming webinars:

• Jul 07: Why is SEO Critical to Online Success? – FREE Webinar
• Jul 14: Do-it-Yourself SEO Part 1
• Jul 15: Introduction to Blogging
• Jul 22: Create & Utilize a Phenomenal LinkedIN Profile
• Aug 25: Do-it-Yourself SEO Part 2

Webinars are becoming a trendy way to share knowledge and grow your business. They provide a convenient opportunity to gather individuals without travel time required by any party. The technology has come so far it literally takes minutes to set up and run a webinar right from your computer.

How can a webinar grow your business?

• It gives you the opportunity to share your expertise.
• You can have anybody with an internet connection join in, so you can reach people who may not be able to come to your office.
• It provides a chance to promote other products.
• It is very inexpensive to hold a gathering.
• It saves valuable time since it takes less time to organize and run a webinar than an in-person presentation.
• It provides an opportunity to stay in touch with your customers.
• Recorded webinars can become assets that you share at a later date.

Why do companies give free webinars?

• Free webinars provide a chance to share what you do.
• Free webinars attract more people than pay ones.
• It is easier to convert an attendee into a paying student once they have experience one of your free webinars.
• It is an opportunity to provide value-added customer service.

Why Landau Design uses webinars

Landau Design has been using online meeting software to train our clients in how to use Joomla. Webinars became a natural extension of this service when our clients began requesting training in areas like search engine optimization, blogging and social media. We now schedule quarterly webinar series which clients can choose from to grow and hone their skills.

This summer we are offering the following classes:

• Jul 07, 2010 – 10:30 AM
  Why is SEO Critical to Online Success? – FREE Webinar
• Jul 14, 2010 – 11:00 AM
  Do-it-Yourself SEO Part 1
• Jul 15, 2010 – 10:00 AM
  Introduction to Blogging
• Jul 22, 2010 – 12:00 PM
  Create & Utilize a Phenomenal LinkedIN Profile
• Aug 25, 2010 – 11:00 AM
  Do-it-Yourself SEO Part 2

One of the myths about being a blogger is that you have to write long posts to capture the attention of your audience. Research has shown that Internet users skim content rather than read it, and they really read only 20% of the content on a page (www.useit.com). Long blog posts are not necessarily better.

On the flip side, life has gotten busier for most, and less time is available for writing a blog, which makes the whole effort seem much more overwhelming. Taking the pressure off of length means procrastination is less likely to happen.

Blogs don’t have to be long to be useful

You can actually design the content on your blog so it suits short posts, which means that you don’t have to spend as much time writing, but your readers will still get exactly what they want. Consider the needs of your readers, and use that as a way to come up with a blog that fulfills a need for them which saves them time, and generates an easy-to-maintain blog for you. The following 10 ideas are great ways to have a short-post blog, but still give some great content to your readers.

1) Spread it Out

Have a great idea for a top-10 list? Or perhaps you have step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish something? Spread the list or the steps over a series of days. There is no rule that says everything has to be in one post, and spreading it over a few days allows you to write a little bit each day. Perhaps each week you have a top 5 list that you share Monday through Friday, then the next week it’s a different subject.

2) Article Review

If you are traveling the web reading articles, let your readers know about the ones that you like best. An article review could be a quick paragraph with your likes and dislikes, with a link to the full article. It doesn’t have to take more than 10 minutes to write, and now you’ve saved your readers time by finding some useful industry information.

3) Industry Trends

Are you reading online trade publications or industry blogs? Do you spot industry trends? Similar to article reviews, capturing links to the information you think your readers will find useful is a great way to save your readers time. And all you have to do is write one short paragraph and insert the link. Do this enough, and your blog will be the first place they stop when looking for what is going on in your industry.

4) Guest Blogging

This doesn’t have to be a short-post blog, but it surely saves you time! You can ask a colleague to guest post on your blog. This means you don’t have to write, they get more exposure, and your readers get some great new ideas. You could actually create an entire blog that is all guest posts in a specific industry. That way you only have to coordinate the blog, never have to write it.

5) Ask a Question

Blogs are about starting a conversation with your customers. So use your blog as a place to get their input. Write a simple, quick question that you would like them to give input on. It could be a question about your company, your customer service, the industry, a new product… whatever you think they would respond to.

6) Link Lists

If you are an avid blog reader, you probably have a lot of great links you can gather together. Pick a topic that you love, and as you do your regular reading, gather links that are pertinent. That’s what we did in our Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile blog. These kinds of blogs are easy to compile, and save so much research time for your readers.

7) Personal Stories

It is always quicker to write a personal story than to write a factual blog that you have to back up with some research. A personal story could share information that is useful to the reader, and it can be short and to-the-point.

Answer a Customer’s Question

There are times when you find yourself writing an email explaining things to a customer. Capture these emails as they make excellent blog posts. This is actually how Simple Web Toolbox got started. We found ourselves answering the same questions over and over, so we decided to put the information in one place so we could point the customers here rather than re-writing the answer again. When you find yourself writing that email explanation, copy, paste and edit it so it’s suitable for a blog post.

9) Update an Old Post

Often a year will have gone by and your industry information has changed, and now some of your old blog posts are outdated. This is an excellent opportunity to repurpose old content. Pull out those old posts and write an update to the information, and link back to the old post. Remember to also edit the old post and link to the new update.

10) Best Of Posts

If you have extensive archives, use a blog post as an opportunity to highlight some of your most popular blogs. Use your comment numbers as a way to judge the most popular, and simply pull the most commented 7-10 posts and put them in a list. This is also an excellent type of post to feature on your home page for the blog, since it represents the most read content, and probably the most interesting content to a new reader.

What are your best ideas for writing a quick blog?

When it comes to a small business website, a significant SEO strategy is your best bet towards driving up visits from online search results. A major component of your SEO strategy should be link building, which means getting links TO your website from other online sources. Unfortunately some companies fall into the misnomer that buying links can easily increase the inbound link numbers, and positively effect search results.

Google has caught on to bought links

Google has gotten so wise to the purchased link market that they will hold it against you. Websites who have a lot of purchased, or spam, links, will be kicked out of Google all together. Google is so serious about this that many blogs have no-follow on their ad links in order to let Google know “this is a bought link, so please don’t count it.” It’s a way to still buy advertising, but not have it held against you in Google.

Fabricated links are obvious to Google

Many companies purchase the services of an SEO company, not realizing that these so-called experts are engaging in “black-hat” or “fake” SEO that could actually hurt their search engine rankings. Some examples of fabricated SEO efforts:

• Putting random comments on blogs to try and gain a back link. We receive dozens of these daily, often the same poster putting the exact same comment on different blog posts. We use Askimet, which is a plugin that weeds out fake comments, so these comments never go live on our blog.
• Buying advertising on parked domains. These pages are often structured around a particular topic so it looks like you’ve gained a pertinent link, but Google is wise to these spam pages and will count these bought links against you.
• Adding your company to link farms. These are sites that are created to appear as if they are a business directory, when in fact they are simply a huge directory of outbound links.
• Duplicating content across the net. This would mean taking the same article and publishing it over and over into many article directories so you can get the in-bound links within the articles. Google is wise to over duplication of content.
• Keyword stuffing pages. Putting to many of the same keyword on a page on your site in an effort to increase the relevance. A keyword density of more than 7% is considered keyword stuffing.

Link building strategies should be authentic

When you set out to gain links into your site, you must find authentic ways to do so. The following provides examples of authentic ways to build your inbound links:

• List your company in online business directories that are pertinent to your industry.
• Comment on blogs that you have honest, valuable comments to contribute to the subject being discussed.
• Create a Squidoo or Hubpages page about a topic pertinent to your business and of interest to others.
• Comment on message boards pertinent to your business arena.
• Write interesting articles and publish them in online article directories.

Rule of thumb

When engaging in a link building strategy, just ask yourself, “Is this content adding value?” This should be your rule of thumb when deciding on how to gain links into your website. If you are putting the link merely to get a link back, this may be risky. If you are putting the link to generate useful content, then continue on!

If you have more than one person in your company who engages in social media, you need to have a social media policy. Social media has quickly become the easiest way to grown your online presence. Through all popular outlets, you can quickly and effectively develop your online reputation and extend the brand of your business.

But the lines between person and business social media are quite blurry. For example:

• If an employee uses Facebook to converse with friends and family, should they be using it to share information about your company?
• If Twitter is how they tell their buddies where they are and what they are doing, should the same account be used to spread marketing messages?
• And what if they are looking for another job, but their personal accounts are intertwined with your business accounts. How does that look for your marketing image?

A social media policy is critical for any business since your online reputation will be significantly impacted by what is said about your company. Unless you provide guidelines for employees, you cannot really be certain what sort of reputation is being developed.

Saying “Don’t do it!” is not a policy

Social media has become a mainstream way of connecting with customers. To tell your employees that social media is not allowed is not realistic in today’s business world. Chances are employees are already engaging in social media for private use, and your social media policy should at least discuss what can be done during work hours. Also, if employees are already using social media, a policy can help to define what private social media outlets may be used to extend the brand of the company.

What should a social media policy govern?

A company social media policy should answer the following questions:

• Who owns the social media accounts that are used by your company?
• If employees have personal accounts, can they use them to market your company?
• What is the policy for talking about the company on personal social media accounts?
• What confidentiality is required around your company information?
• What copyright issues should be considered?
• What social media arenas does the company participate in?
• What individuals in the company are responsible for social media, and for those who aren’t responsible, what is their input (if any)?
• Who is in charge of reviewing social media output?
• Who is responsible for responding to customer complaints that appear in social media arenas?

Here are some excellent articles we found that can help you craft a social media policy:

• How to Write a Social Media Policy
• 10 Must-Haves For Your Social Media Policy
• Secrets to Writing a Social Media Policy That Actually Means Something

Sample Social Media Policies

If you’re are in the process of creating a social media policy, Social Media Governance keeps a database of corporate social media policies. They have example from many companies, including FedEx, Cisco and Harvard Law School.

SEO is all about the words. How you write your words, put them together and publish them determines your fate in the search engine rankings. Weaving in your keywords is the crux of getting the highest rankings. But how can you be sure you have done it appropriately?

You might ask yourself:

• Have I chosen the right keywords?
• Have I used keywords too many times (which will hurt you if you have)?
• Do the keywords show up in key areas of my page?
• Should I write for my users or the search engines?

Scribe has created a plugin that will answer all these questions for you. This simple plugin works in Wordpress and Joomla, and it can analyze your page and let you know your SEO score. It gives you an actual percentage out of a 100 to let you know how well you’ve done. But Scribe goes one beyond that, it gives you suggestions on how to fix your content in order to get a higher score. With one click you can find out how well you’re doing and if the search engines are going to like what they see.

Scribe has gone one step further in offering a FREE PDF download on how to write content for the web. This report will help you learn the ins and outs of writing for the Web. Written by Copyblogger founder Brian Clark, this definitive guide is a must-have for anybody who writes a blog or manages a website. The best part is, this download is totally free. You don’t have to sign up for an email list, create a login account, or anything. Simply go to the Scribe download page and click download.