Here at BlackBoxSocialMedia, we’ve talked a lot about how to create more visibility for yourself and your company using SEO techniques. But what if some of that visibility affects your online reputation in a negative way. Well there are certain SEO techniques that you can also use to make sure that when others search for you using Google and other search engines the information they find is more flattering than repulsive.
SEO: What Searches Say About You
According to a Mashable article, “Of the almost 80% of U.S. hiring managers who had searched for candidates online, 70% of them said they had rejected a candidate based on what they found in his or her search results, according to a 2009 study commissioned by Microsoft.”
This astonishing statistic should let you know that how you appear online could impact your chances of landing that job that your heart is set on. So our first and foremost SEO task is to simply search our names and see what we find before ‘the man’ does.
When we find something damaging to our online reputation the easiest way to fix it is to see if we posted it. Let’s say you posted a video on Vimeo of that house party where you danced half naked on the roof to Journey. Probably not a qualifier to work at Microsoft. We will want to improve our SEO here by simply modifying our privacy settings on Vimeo or wherever you uploaded the video so that its not available for the public to view. No need to delete it all together this is classic material that you know you’ll want to revisit later, just with the appropriate parties present.
You will also want to protect your privacy using SEO techniques. Make sure that you report personal information found in a search to Google, such as your social security number, as Google will instantly remove the information from their searches.
Another useful SEO trick that comes in handy is that “Google usually only likes to rank one result per domain name per page,” he says. “So if you could get another result on the same domain name like Huffington Post that was better optimized for your name, you could theoretically knock the bad article off,” according to Patrick Ambron, the cofounder of a personal online reputation management service called Brand-Yourself.
SEO: Keep It Positive
A surefire SEO technique that helps you and your company look better in a search is to publish positive content. You may not be able to delete negative news or information, but you can curb its influence by putting effort forward to constantly publish content and articles that give you and your company a good image. Sometimes it’s all about quanity, so the more good equals less bad info in search results.
Mashable says, “Profiles on social networks are powerful tools for this purpose, as results from large sites like Facebook andTwitter often carry more SEO power than a single post on something like a personal blog.”
SEO: Create A Hub
Here are four golden SEO rules to help control what others see in a search:
- Link all of your content – This improves your SEO, because Google counts every link as a vote for your site.
- Use your name ALOT – Tell the search trawlers that the site is about you. Improve name SEO by mentioning yourself a lot on your pages, without sounding to spammy.
- Claim your domain – Make sure that your name is in the URL of your page.
- Post everyday – If you post fresh positive content everyday, then your SEO is sure to improve as all search engines love to give up-to-date content.