Google yourself, your company, your friends. Do you like the results you see on your preferred search engine? If you don’t, there are things you can do about it to make your online presence a more positive one. Online reputation and reputation management are of the highest importance in today’s online community, and simply monitoring the results are not enough to change what you are seeing a into a positive search result. Many a person has to turn to a social media agency to help them after seeing negative information online.

Does your company have nonconstructive reviews on a site (like Angie’s list?) There are a number of steps you can take to spin the results into a more positive light and take proactive steps with online reputation and reputation management. First, you can respond to the results and clarify your side of the story-but make sure you do so in a way that doesn’t seem like an attack on the individual making the claim. Apologize for their bad experience and offer to do whatever is needed to repair the situation. You can also ask friends or family members to write positive reviews about your company, or take e-mailed or handwritten reviews from old clients and post them onto the site.

Another great idea is to make a Twitter or Facebook account (or both) for your business (or yourself, if that’s the online reputation you’re trying to build or repair.) In this way, customers have a place to discuss your company and ask questions in one fixed spot. And with these sites, you can ask your customers questions and make them feel a part of your online community. These sites will also build up your online presence, which is another facet of online reputation and reputation management.

Getting involved in blog posts about your industry and even charitable events can also increase your online reputation and how you are perceived in an online search. Discussing topics that are relevant to your industry and getting involved in events that will be covered by your local online community are a great reputation management practice and will increase your presence in the online community.

Online reputation and reputation management are imperative in today’s business world, and they directly shape how the public will feel about your business. Taking steps to correct the negative and fortify the positive in the online community will be constructive for both existing and prospective clients to learn more about your business. And the more positively you are seen to the public, the more business your company will do as a result.

Do you think you would like to find out about online reputation? Do you think you would like for more information about hiring a social media agency? Check us out at fishbat.com for more information!. Free reprint available from: How Online Reputation and Reputation Management Should Influence Search Engine Tactics.

Images can not only make your website visually attractive, they also help you gain more daily search engine traffic. Google Image Search is the version of Google dedicated to images and it is a very effective technique for your search engine marketing strategy and implicitly for your search engine optimisation strategy. Google Image Search has billions of images available from websites that have been already indexed. According to Hitwise UK, Google Image Search gets more traffic than supposed major search engines in the UK, which gives it a huge potential for your search engine optimisation as a source of traffic for your site.
For a business trying to integrate search engine marketing strategies as to improve their search engine optimisation, the use of Google Image Search is very effective. If done correctly, the optimisation of your images can bring a number of advantages:

* it can drive traffic and bring a great number of visitors to your website,

* it helps define your overall page theme.

However, there are guidelines one needs to follow to get his image on Google Image Search. There is no possibility to use search engine submission as to submit your image to Google, as with websites. That is because results are entirely shown by Google’s algorithm after robots have indexed the complete websites with images. Google’s imaging spider is called Google Image Bot. It crawls the web and indexes all of the pages it can find. Since it cannot ‘see’ images, so it only takes them based on a number of factors:

1. Descriptive Image Name.

2. Compliant Images.

3. On Page Optimization.

4. PageRank and Backlinks.

5. Website Relevancy.

6. Image Storage.

These are the guidelines for Google-sensitive image reference one should follow -

1. Make your image file name keyword rich – include the keywords you want to rank high in the file name and make the folder accessible to robots.

2. Alt tags should have keywords – Alt tags are designed to provide alternative text when images cannot be displayed. They should describe what the image is about.

3. Put your keywords in the image title tag – It is shown when the user hovers over the image.

4. Add target keywords in the text close to the image -Surround your image with related text for robots to give high ranking.

5. Optimize your page for the keywords – Include the keywords in the title tags, meta tags and header tags. It is important that you have a high keyword density on the page that the image is on.

6. Re-upload images – Uploading same pictures in a gap of few months helps in maintaining search freshness for robots.

7. Make your images large – many people search large size images when they use google images. Also a high-resolution image works better than low resolution.
Use Google Image Labeller, it’s a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.

If you have used Google Image Search in your online marketing strategy or are planning to use it as part of your search engine marketing and search engine optimisation strategy, we would love to hear your thoughts!

SysComm International is a social networking company, online reputation management and search engine marketing company. Click here to contact us.