Reputation Management Tips – 2

Here are few free online reputation management tips available to help build, boost or repair a web presence for professionals such as lawyers, financial advisors, or those in the art world.

The tips range from content creation, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), monitoring, and off-site suggestions.

  • While hardly as useful as it once was, it is still useful to create a Google+ account and post and comment daily.  Follow influencers in your field and engage with them.  Since it’s a Google platform, it will be indexed very quickly making it a great online reputation management tip.
  • Adding visual information to Pinterest can also be very powerful. Comment on others, “like” and “Pin” compelling images.  The best times to post images are after 8pm or the weekends. Look to gain Followers too and develop Boards that are clear, colorful and have a specific niche.
  • YouTube and videos are extremely powerful ways to repair an online reputation.  Create one that focuses on you and the positive things you do.  Keep it brief and as professional as possible, and offer useful information.
  • Reddit is an extremely popular site that aggregates news and comments on various topics.  It can sometimes be hard to add a comment or link because it is geared to block spam or frequent additions.
  • Yelp is a very popular review site, and having a presence there is a way to boost your online reputation.  Create some legitimate reviews for places you genuinely like, and avoid the temptation to write a glowing review for yourself posing as someone else—it’s illegal and if you get caught, this could damage things further.
  • This could be one of the more difficult online reputation management tip to mange on your own, but based on your readers or clients, come up with a handful of good search terms.  An art in itself, the main focus is to find a specific phrase that is attainable based on site traffic. These terms will then become the basis for ongoing content strategy and will be used in social media profiles as well as used occasionally in blog titles or headings.
  • Be sure your web site is optimized, ideally for the negative term.  This could be complicated and might involve an SEO or ORM expert, but make sure your name or your company is included in the title metatags of some of your pages.  The page’s Title is the link that Google displays when searching for you, and without it set up properly, the good information about you won’t be found.
  • Links pointing to your web site help drive traffic and shows search engines such as Google that you are a noteworthy, good site, thus helping your ranking. Developing a good linking strategy can be extremely time consuming but is worthwhile.  Never buy links: as Google continues to weed out bad links, you’ll quickly get blacklisted and ruin your reputation further.
  • As mentioned above, images are more important than ever to Google, and having a properly named image file is crucial.  Be sure when adding images to blogs to make sure all additional fields are completed.
  • Monitor your online reputation by signing up forfree Google Alerts. Note that you need a Google account, but you should have one already—if you don’t, get one immediately.  Here you simply enter the word or phrase you want to monitor, and when that shows up online, you’ll get an email notification.  Usually, use your name or your business name. 
  • Being visible in public is a way to generate positive news about you and build an excellent reputation, so pick some topics that you are an expert in and contact a local library, club or business organization and offer to give a talk.  It it is noteworthy, it could be picked up by a news site or blog.
  • A Meetup is a great online and “offline” reputation management tool.  It is free to  participate in a Meetup group, so join several in your area and post comments after attending a meeting.  If you’d like to create a Meetup, it costs about $79 to start a group for six months. Managing a group can be time consuming to create frequent group meetings but focus them around your expertise.  Remember to announce the Meetups on your social media platforms.