Electronic Retailer - January 2012 - 28

WHEN WORDS CAN HURT

authoritative by Google and will appear high in search results. If your company has an opportunity to engage in public relations, take it! Blogs, newspapers, magazines, television stations and radio shows all produce online content. Using SEO strategies, you can then promote the news coverage and syndicate on your own social networking sites and blogs, which can cause the original article to appear on page one of a search result.

3. Proactively build and syndicate content.
Creating, summarizing and syndicating any and all positive content about your company, product or name can help bump an original source to page one. Your company executives can: • Create a company blog that exists separate from the corporate domain. Update the blog regularly with fresh, keyword-rich content. • Submit guest articles to relevant industry blogs and publications. Be sure to provide “link juice” to the articles by linking to them from your own blog and social networking site. (Google considers articles that have a lot of incoming links to be more authoritative than those with only a few incoming links.) • Summarize any press releases, news stories or blog reviews of your product or company. Automatically syndicate these across your social networking sites and your blog, linking to the original source.

is receiving thousands of mentions an hour, you might need a more sophisticated system. If your company is not being talked about that often, Google Alerts can allow you to monitor the online conversation without too much hassle. • Search your product, company, brand or name weekly on Twitter and the top search engines. Look carefully at the first few pages of search results. • Immediately hire an online reputation expert if you have a negative mention on page one of a search result or if you start noticing a trend in negative mentions. • Remember, never click on negative articles or reviews. This will only increase the ranking of these sites.

5. Learn and apply the basics of search engine optimization so you can promote positive mentions of your company, brand, product or name.
Search engine optimization is complex and ever changing. Entire companies packed with tech experts analyze Google trends and evaluate the algorithm that determines how and why certain key phrases rank. If your company needs major damage control, a do-it-yourself mentality about SEO is probably insufficient. But if you want to proactively dominate page one as a preemptive measure, here are a few things you can do without engaging a professional: • Include your search term in headlines, and ask anyone else posting positive reviews to do the same. Also include the search term a few times within the article. • Familiarize yourself with social bookmarking sites, and bookmark all the content you develop, as well as positive mentions posted by other sources. • When linking, always use your search terms as the anchor text. For instance, instead of hyperlinking “click here,” hyperlink your company’s name. This allows Google to

4. Monitor the online conversation.
Keeping an ear on the online conversation allows you to strike back with an aggressive reputation-management campaign should any negative information appear. While many companies offer tools at a cost, a company can take basic preemptive measures without incurring the expense. • First, subscribe to Google Alerts, a service that will notify you anytime your search terms are mentioned online. If your company or product 28

see the association between a page and a search term. • Title and tag your company’s website, images and videos with your search terms. Instead of using page titles like “home,” “about,” or “contact,” consider using phrases that specifically describe your business, products or services. If you wish to use your brand’s name in the title, use it at the end of the title tag instead of the beginning. • Same goes for videos and images. Use the search term for tags, titles and alt-tags. • When posting a video on YouTube, include channel, title and keyword. Then link to it from your other sites. • Deliver “link juice” to sites you want to promote. If a blogger posts a positive review or a media outlet reports on your product, be sure to link to the articles from your social networking sites (including relevant blogs), your own blog and your company’s website. This will allow the original source to appear higher in search results. Finally, a word of caution: Never engage in unethical or “black hat” tactics. Google’s algorithm is clever; if you try to trick it, Google can counter your efforts by pushing even your own website to page three or four of a search result. Google penalizes companies for keyword cramming, the practice of stuffing a search term as many time as possible into an article, and “link farming,” the practice of selling or exchanging links with irrelevant sites so as to artificially bump up a search term. Chris Rosica is author of The Authentic Brand and Business of Cause Marketing. He is an expert in online reputation management, media training, crisis communications, public relations and internet marketing. He is managing partner of Interact Marketing (www.InteractMarketing. com) and president of Rosica PR, a 31-year-old national PR agency. Email Chris at Chris@Rosica.com.

electronicRETAILER | January 2012

Electronic Retailer - January 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Electronic Retailer - January 2012