Rumblings of discomfort are being felt by some web users who have found to their cost that someone, somewhere sees what you do online. The social media sites are great networking tools, and can be useful for business. But if you don’t take steps to guard your reputation there can be repercussions.

Most recently Twitter has come in for some close scrutiny because every micro-post by members can potentially be indexed by the search engines, and therefore could appear in a search. From reading the ‘tweets’ posted by members, I can imagine that some could find their twitter activity potentially embarrassing, and even a threat to their business credibility.

Another social media site that has been exposed for serious security gaps exposing users to all kinds of private leaks is MySpace. Here’s a Google search of just some of the ways MySpace has been in the news recently for privacy issues.

Although personal interaction does not go out for public consumption on most social media sites, your profile is indexed by many, including Facebook, Flikr, YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, LinkedIn, Xing, FriendFeed and as we mentioned, Twitter.

Here’s a list of what NOT to do if you value your online reputation:

• Never insult, accuse, or otherwise denigrate anyone on a social media site of any kind, unless you don’t care if it comes back to bite you.
• Never write anything about yourself anywhere online that you wouldn’t want your boss, mother, husband or friend to know about you. Someone is bound to draw their attention to it sooner or later.
• Never announce your intention to divorce your husband, fire your boss, crash your car to claim the insurance, or set fire to your neighbor’s cat anywhere online either, for the same reasons noted above.
• Unless you feel it won’t make a difference, don’t use bad language that could affect how other people think about you.
• Think very carefully before indulging in online venting of your feelings about someone who has done something bad to you, because they might decide to repay the compliment.

On the other hand, you can also use these same mechanisms for avoiding bad situations and even turning them to your advantage. It is relatively easy to create a good reputation or a positive effect using your everyday online activities. For example, let’s suppose you want to get promoted. First you want to start posting flattering comments (make them believable–no obvious boot-licking here) about your boss or your superiors. Make it conversational. You may, or may not, want to mention somewhere your ambitions: depends on the job and the situation. Then make sure that the existence of these posts is ‘discovered’ by at least one critical person who you think might take the bait and pass it on.

This won’t work by itself of course. You have to have done your homework in the real world too.

Managing Your Online Reputation When Things Have Gone Bad

Now supposing someone has written something really bad about you online, or you’ve done the deed to yourself in a moment of weakness. How then do you make this nastiness go away? The first thing to do is the most obvious: go to whoever is in charge of the website and ask them nicely to please take it down.

If that doesn’t work, and chances are it won’t, then you’ll have to go the long route. You need to make sure that lots of positive information about you is posted on the web, and that it appears on pages that are considered an ‘authority.’ The idea is to produce lots of other Google entries mentioning you in a positive light, so that the bad stuff gets buried deep within a search. The deeper the better.

One quick and easy way is to sign up with all the social media sites you can find and make sure that all the good stuff is included. The professional networking site, LinkedIn is particularly good for getting a positive profile indexed. Your own website (if possible with your name in the URL) is a perfect medium for controlling what gets said about you. If you have a blog, that’s good too. But you need to work hard to get it noticed. Commenting on other good blogs is a fast way to get your information indexed.

An alternative to this (it can be pretty time-consuming) is to hire someone to do it for you. It won’t be cheap–but how much is your reputation worth? Some celebrities are rumored to have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure bad news is buried. The good news is that reputation management for the average Joe Bloggs will probably be a lot less expensive!

Here are a few celebrities who have recently paid to make bad news about them ‘go away.’ Kate Moss Paris Hilton, Mel Gibson, Madonna, and many, many more.

Some high profile companies who have found reputation management a dire necessity include Halliburton, Enron, and Hewlett Packard. Note that these results don’t come up in a straightforward search for the company name. Type into a search (for example) ‘Halliburton accused.’

But for the most part you won’t read about this kind of reputation management online or in the news. Quite simply, most SEOs and reputation management experts sign non-disclosure agreements with their clients so they don’t spill the beans. After all, no matter how deep dirt is buried, if they know it’s there, lots of people will dig for it (no pun intended).

A word of consolation if something unpleasant has surfaced about you on the Internet: Most of us are nowhere near as interesting as celebrities or big-name companies, so not only is it easy to bury negative information, not many people will be interested or notice it while it’s coming at the top of a search. If you proactively employ reputation management strategies as outlined, you can very quickly forget about bad publicity.

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Building traffic is a critical goal for any website, blog or otherwise. Without traffic there is, in essence, no point in existing. That’s why every now and then someone comes up with a free or paid traffic tool that initially creates a lot of buzz, but eventually falls flat. This scenario has been played out again and again since the beginning of the World Wide Web.

All of these programs are highly-acclaimed traffic tools to begin with, but they nearly all end up being not what you would expect.

There are literally hundreds–and probably thousands–of traffic programs. I’m only going to talk about one briefly for now, but if you want to take a look at them (can’t imagine why) here’s a Google Search.

I’ve tried a few and not been at all impressed, but when BlogRush was launched I allowed myself to get talked into trying it. To begin with it was touted by many to be the holy grail for those seeking an effortless increase in traffic. As far as I’m concerned BlogRush is just another failure. I removed it today since in the past couple of months I’ve received the grand total of seven visitors as a result of carrying the BlogRush widget on my blog. It’s not worth the space, sadly.

Upon reflection, what happens with most of these traffic tools, BlogRush included, is that we spend time and effort building traffic while the people who own them and their cliques enjoy the fruits of our labor. I’m convinced that traffic that should rightfully be ours is channeled into their sites. Anyone contend with that?

So what do you do to build traffic effectively? I have to tell you if you want the easy answer–there isn’t one. It takes time, effort and patience:

1. Create content that your visitors want to read. If you don’t have time, hire someone.
2. Create a linking strategy to get quality links coming into your site.
3. Spend time creating social networking contacts on all the major sites.
4. Take the time to comment on other people’s blogs–it’s really good source of quality links.
5. Investigate Stumbleupon which can yield staggering amounts of traffic–if you take the time to reciprocate. Newsflash: you won’t get traffic if you don’t stumble. (Here’s my page–connect up!)
6. Give something away or create a viral promotion such as a free report.

And by the way, forget link-swapping as a traffic strategy. It may improve your ranking but it does nothing for traffic flow. What you need is quality links from huge websites. I get quite a lot of traffic from SEOmoz, Sphinn and a few others but only because they’re huge and their pages often turn up in searches on Google.

For more great traffic tips, SEObook is about as good as it gets. Dave Taylor also has a great page on building traffic as does Copyblogger.

One huge advantage to building organic traffic like this is that it’s permanent. After the initial effort, apart from adding regular content, you’ll get traffic truly with little effort. With a traffic program if you stop using it the traffic stops too.

Finally, for a little bit of fun, here’s Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim with his parody, Top Ten Ways to Build Blog Traffic.

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For the longest time my main work website Wellwrittenwords was #2 on Yahoo for the term ‘SEO Copywriter’. And for a long time before that I was on the first page, although my placement wavered between 4 and 6.

Then a couple of SEO celebrities (who shall remain nameless) told me that including the keywords meta tag was pointless as none of the search engines use it any more, and it just gives your competition information about what you’re trying to rank for.

Being the trusting soul that I am, I removed my keywords meta tag.

I disappeared on Yahoo altogether. I mean I was buried. I couldn’t even find myself in a search. It never even occurred to me that it was the keywords tag. Alright, I know, that was really stupid.

Anyway, finally it dawned on me so I rushed in there and put back the keywords meta tag. It took three or four days, but I gradually began to see my site climbing in Yahoo again, and even my worsening situation on Google improved. I’m now back on page 2 at #12 on Yahoo, I’m happy to report (see below). Of course you don’t have to take my word for it. If you have the keywords meta tag installed, take it out and see what happens. If you don’t, put it in and see what happens.

My experience brings up another issue apart from the intricacies of ranking on Yahoo. It’s that of whether some experts make honest mistakes, or whether some of them lead others astray deliberately, which I’ve heard being bandied about. What do you think? What’s your experience with the keywords meta tag? Do tell us!

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Getting indexed by Google News is a fairly new trophy for bloggers. The extra exposure you’d get from being included on a major news site such as Google News blows the mind. Who wouldn’t want it? As yet though, there’s not much out about how to achieve it. It’s one of my goals and when I set out to discover what I need to do, it occurred to me there must be plenty of others who’d be interested. So here goes.

It’s important to note that getting indexed by Google, and getting indexed by Google News are two entirely different things. Getting indexed by Google is a simple matter of having someone who is crawled regularly link to you. Can be a matter of only a few hours.

But getting Google News to like you is harder. There are rules and if you’re not following them, well, you can forget about getting indexed.

Much of it has to do with common sense. Make sure you comply with all of Google Webmaster’s guidelines.

• Never use a default theme for your blogging platform. Google hates ‘em (see right).
• Make sure you’re getting indexed for your chosen keywords–one good way to do this is to name your blog categories for your major keywords.
• Make sure your stories fit the criteria for the type of stories regularly included on Google News. A good way to get an idea would be to simply go over there and take a look in the category where stories from your site might get posted.

You Need Multiple Bloggers

One thing that Matt Cutts mentioned in his 2007 SEO WordPress talk at WordCamp, was that you stand a much higher chance of getting indexed if you have more than one person posting to your blog.

This is fairly easy to arrange: swap blog posts with other bloggers you know and whose work you like. It goes without saying that their niche has to at least be compatible with yours if it isn’t identical. It’s also a good idea to invite selected bloggers to write guest posts for you. This is usually a win-win situation because you will be providing exposure and backlinks to your guests.

Remember too that even if some of your posts are indexed by Google News, they probably won’t all be, as the most important criteria are to do with the article itself and not the website overall. This is another way in which Google News differs from the Google search engine, which will index all your stuff if it has accepted your site.

If anyone has any more good tips for getting indexed by Google News, please post a comment below. We’ll all thank you for it.

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Like any other industry (but perhaps even more so than some) the virtual marketing industry has its celebrities. What I’ve noticed is that the guys at the very top, like Aaron Wall of SEOBook, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz and Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland, and bloggers of huge import–OK I was going to name a couple here but I fell into that trap yesterday and was reproached for not (at first) mentioning all the greats. Here’s my list of Red Hot Bloggers (scroll down a bit). It’s not complete–I couldn’t include everyone who I consider exceptional.

All these are nice, friendly, and very approachable people. Then there’s Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki who are both towering personalities of the marketing world, online and off, and they still manage to be nice to everyone they come across.

Beginning to see a pattern? Because I most certainly have.

Then there’s a strata in all these niches that consists of individuals who prematurely think themselves great and too-good-for-the-rest-of-us, and behave like (put celebrity name here) chasing paparazzi with a shotgun every time someone not in their clique comes near.

Branding Yourself as a Nice Person

Just like anyone else I understand the constraints of juggling an ever-expanding professional life with life in general. The more successful (and therefore busier) you become, the more people will naturally seek a chunk of your time. But personal branding is a very important part of becoming good at what you do. You only have to take a look at Britanny Spears to know that this is true. If you don’ t know how to treat people your success will die a premature death.

Now let me tell you about someone who I now know is even better than his personal branding suggests, and who actually exceeds his legend.

I’ve been a fan of Guy Kawasaki for years. I have several of his books and even though his expertise is only loosely applicable to the SEO industry, I try and make time to read his latest.

Don’t Underestimate Twitter

So it was with interest yesterday that I discovered he’s on twitter. I hurried to follow him, hoping that I might catch some of his wisdom through his tweets. And yes, this is a major reason why twitter is just so popular. In fact, that’s what I love best about it–you can absorb small nuggets of knowledge from so many people of your choice without any effort.

When I woke up this morning, only a few hours after following him, I found that Guy had actually bothered to follow me back. My jaw hit the floor. Now THAT my friends is personal branding in style. You can’t tell me that Guy has loads of time on his hands. Although I have read from him that he tries to make time for what he considers the important things in life, following people he’s never heard of on twitter can’t be one of those. I never for one moment expected him to follow me, I would have been more than content to here what he has to say. But he followed me and now my opinion of him is indestructible!

Then there’s Darren Rowse, who has to be another one of the busiest people on the planet. Yes he just published this list of ways to contact him on his blog.

If you want to make it in any walk of life you have to be nice to be near. And I’m not talking about personal hygiene. Those who don’t like giving as well as taking should resign themselves to mediocrity, where they belong. It’s just not good enough to be nice only when you want someone to scrape up a few extra follows for you on twitter, (and then you don’t even bother to follow them back or help them out), or when you want a few extra Sphinns or a stumble but you’re not prepared to do the same in return (off the top of my head here). Business is all about reciprocity no matter what your line.

Twitter is just one of the social marketing sites that you can use to successfully brand yourself in so many ways. Being nice to those you meet along your way is only a small part of it all, but it can also be a major contribution to your success. It pays to remember that often the people you network with are potential customers, and if that’s not the case, then they almost certainly rub shoulders with potential customers of yours. Someone like Rand Fishkin, who always answers his email and isn’t too high-and-mighty to hob-nob with those who are still trying to make it in this business, will be my first choice for a recommendation, unlike those who have been rude or mean to me, or who have been unwilling to return favors.

Sure, upsetting just one person online won’t put much of a dent in your bottom line. But if you make the huge mistake of considering yourself an island, you can kiss goodbye to those big profits you’re dreaming about.

Rant over!

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I researched this list to motivate myself as much as anything else. No matter how long you’ve been blogging there’s always room for improvement. To improve my own blogging skills I’ve looked to outstanding bloggers for inspiration. You’ll find a list at the bottom of this post.

1. Successful bloggers are truthful: you can be confident that a little research won’t turn up gaping holes in their testimony.
2. They passionately adore their subject. This is a must. Your passion must also ignite your reader’s passion. Never try and blog about something you don’t love.
3. They are ambitious. Building a popular blog takes a lot of work and determination. Long hours spent writing and long hours spent learning the craft of blogging.
4. Their writing is conversational and easy-to-read. While most readerships are forgiving of the odd typo, copy that is riddled with spelling mistakes and missing words is just as off-putting as writing that doesn’t speak to the reader. Spend a little time perfecting your writing style. Examine the writing style of bloggers you find most interesting to read. Your byword should be ‘proofread.’
5. They make their blog look nice.There’s no excuse not to do this. Now you can get literally hundreds of nice-looking templates if you use a platform like WordPress. It’s easy and free, so pick one that will appeal to your target niche. Also, don’t forget to dig out an interesting picture or photo to accompany your blog posts. It’s well known that pictures make your posts a lot more attractive to a lot more people.
6. They blog regularly. This is quite possibly the most difficult thing of all to achieve. Blogging is a long-term commitment, and when you have eager readers and sponsors (advertisers) depending on you, you can’t just take a holiday whenever it pleases you.
7. Their posts are of more-or-less uniform quality. Research and care leave traces. There’s a huge difference to the reader between an article that has been lovingly crafted and a few paragraphs hurriedly strung together. This is another difficult habit to nail down. Sometimes you just don’t feel like blogging. I’ve found that it’s better to just leave a gap in your blogs rather than post any old junk. A good trick is to always have three or four draft posts ready to be dusted off and posted if you’re pushed for time, or just plain don’t feel like it.
8. Bloggers are, almost without exception, nice people. Even if they thrive on controversy, they’re not mean or insulting. To take this point a little further, the most popular bloggers are the nicest ones, like Darren Rowse of Problogger, or Maki of DoshDosh.
9. They love to learn. Blogging is a craft that needs to be learned. It takes a great deal of experimentation and reading to get to the point where you’re gaining readers on a daily basis and making your way into people’s RSS readers. To get you started in the right direction, consume this list by Problogger.
10. Successful bloggers network. Having a circle of others who know their subject and who are prepared to give opinions and otherwise help out is an invaluable aid to the blogging process. Their favorite haunts are sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, twitter, FaceBook, FriendFeed and others.
11. They are heavily into social media and social networking for the potential extra exposure. See list in bullet above.
12. The more popular a blog becomes, the more you’ll notice that the blogger is frequently seen in SEO circles. There are even a number of notable bloggers whose opinions on SEO are widely respected. Search engine optimization is essential for your blogging success, and the most important part of optimizing your blog is getting inbound links. You can do this by having great content that others want to link to, and by commenting on other good blogs. Don’t forget linking between your blog posts for legitimate links too. Beyond that, here are some great tips for optimizing your blog from Search Engine Land, and another from Pronet Advertising.
13. Successful bloggers give their readers information that is not just interesting–it has to be useful too. If you can help your readers out in their daily work or lives they’ll be back again and again.
14. For the most part, successful blogs deal with a niche–a specific part of a subject. There are a few examples of blogs that deal with a wide range of subjects though. One I love is Lifehacker.
15. They are prepared to spend literally hours a day to post, network and improve their blog. I would say that two-three hours a day is the minimum you’ll get by on if you want a remarkably successful blog. Just being honest here, for all those who think they can get by on twenty minutes a day!
16. The most successful blogs are those that form a community. Good bloggers are good community leaders, and for many blogs this is key. Over to Guy Kawasaki for more on building a community.
17. Create dialog with other top bloggers. It’s no coincidence that all the top blogs regularly refer to posts on other blogs, and even engage in conversation with other bloggers through their posts. This takes the concept of community building to a higher level and provides readerships with further resources that will be useful to them.

Bloggers I find Outstanding

(In no particular order)

• Darren Rowse of Problogger
• Maki of DoshDosh
• Chiropractic of Planet Chiropractic
• Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz
• Dave Taylor of Ask Dave Taylor
• Brian Clark of Copyblogger
• Michael Gray of Wolf Howl
• Rae Hoffman of SugarRae
• Lyndon Antcliff of Cornwall SEO
• Chris Garrett of ChrisG.com
• Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog
• Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void
• Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz

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Ever noticed how sometimes a few straggling birdies get left behind each year when all the others are migrating to better climates? Chances are those that get left behind end up not making it at all.

I hate to be a drama queen (not known for it), but if you are stubborn about not getting involved with twitter, you might just find yourself wishing you’d joined the rest of the flock, especially if you work online.

I know there are a number of online personalities who, like me in the beginning, see twitter as just one more social-media drain on our time, but I’m happy to admit that I was wrong on that score. I’m now a self-confessed twitter-holic.

The twitter world is fast developing into a hub for the various industries. All you need do to ensure permanent access to professional opinions, great company, and breaking news, is open an account and search for all the people in your industry you wish you had access to. You’ll probably be surprised how many are already on twitter. Join as many communities you want, and you’re all set.

Remember though, that if you want to use twitter for family and friends too, you’d be better off opening more than one account so that your professional associates can’t end up reading your family small talk.

Like many others in the SEO industry in particular, I’ve discovered that twitter is wonderful for keeping me in touch with what’s going on. We’re even privy to breaking news as it’s actually breaking, and I love hearing about stuff before anyone else does!

There are a number of twitter clients designed to help you get the most of your micro-blogging experience. Instead of exhausting (and boring) myself, I’m going to send you over to this brilliant list. That should be plenty to keep you going for a while. My favorite (and the only one I use) is Twhirl. It’s easy, non-intrusive, meaning I can work while I’m using it, and it seems to have few bugs. In the bargain, you can log onto multiple accounts and read them all from the same tiny window. Brilliant.

My one pet peeve with Twhirl, however, was that it opened links in IE instead of FireFox, which is my default browser. I tweeted about it a couple of times but no one answered my cries for help. Then yesterday Andy Beard encountered the same problem, so my eyes were glued to his tweets until he came up with an answer, which I knew he would. So it is with full credit going to Andy that I present to you the solution here! I’m so happy that now when I click on a link in a tweet, it comes up in FireFox. I HATE IE!

Just in case any twitter people get to read this, one thing both twitter and Twhirl are lacking is an efficient search mechanism. If you just know you saw a tweet about something important a few days ago, you can’t find it in search (well not reliably). You need to go back through all the tweets, which can be an extreme headache, particularly if you’re pushed for time which we all are.

But I love twitter, and even the attractions of FriendFeed can’t lure me away, well not for now anyway.

So what do I mean by ‘don’t miss the twitter migration?’ It seems to me that at some point they’ll probably have to change the rules for twitter, when it gets too big to manage in its present format. Maybe there will come a time when you can’t just decide to ‘follow’ any person of your choice. For me this is a totally valid reason to get in now before things do change (of course, then again they might not). And then there’s always the fact that some pretty impressive individuals are still willing to follow you back. Once they’ve got upwards of 10,000 followers that’s unlikely to be the case.

Oh, and if you love the little birdie with attitude featured in the twitter logo, you’ll be impressed to know that it’s the work of another twitter-holic, non other than cartoonist Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void.

If you want to start somewhere, follow me on twitter!

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In a few weeks I will be traveling again, so coming across this post on securing your laptop for customs inspection
was pretty timely for me. A laptop is precious to anyone who owns one, but for those of us who conduct all our business from one, it becomes more than precious.

I have suffered extreme anxiety at times when my laptop has suffered an ‘incident.’ The last one was when the motherboard failed on my Toshiba Satellite back in September. I now have a Compaq Presario V6000 from the UK. I think there is an HP equivalent (same company now).

Anyway, I was recently thinking about things I can do to lessen the stress of taking my laptop abroad with me, given that so many things could possibly happen. It’s obvious that you want to back up your hard drive onto a thumb drive before you travel.

And while we’re on the subject of traveling with a laptop, remember that it’s not always safe to connect up to just any Wi-Fi connection you come across. NEVER send your private information anywhere while connected to an unfamiliar network. For more dos and dont’s, here’s an essential Wi-Fi list.

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