Reputation Armor

Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) forecasts:

The next Google PageRank (Google PR Update)

PageRank values fluctuate from 0 – 10, PR0 being the slightest and PR10 the highest valued.

The first PR update this year was on the 2010 New Year. Reputation Armor observes previous Google PR update patterns, and forecasts that the next PR update will be between March 31st and mid April. There will most likely be 4 PR updates from Google in 2010.

Future PageRank Update forecast by Reputation Armor

o          March 31 – mid April 2010

o          June 30 – mid July 2010

o          September 30 – mid October 2010

o          December 31 – mid January 2011

Reputation Armor note: The above figures are based on supposition, made by Reputation Armor, by observing the previous patterns of Google. There may be insignificant PR updates throughout the year, but the foremost

Over the years Reputation Armor has seen the number of Social networking sites grow very fast. Below is list of the top 175 social networking sites. Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) utilizes a majority of these, along with others, in order to deliver our clients a comprehensive social networking base to their reputation management campaign. *Listed Alphabetically*

Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) wants our potential clients to understand that your name is in all actuality a brand. Individuals identify you by that name when deciding whether to do business with you, at least as far as online. Your name is also what will be drawn on in order to search out positive or negative reviews.

Do you own your name online?

Do you own “YourName.com? For example, “ReputationArmor.com”. What about nicknames and product names associated with you and your company? Also, sub-domains are very important, for example, “ReputationArmor.net”, and “ReputationArmor.org”

Even if you by no means plan to construct these into real websites, having someone else own these sites can be disastrous. Someone out there may decide that they don’t necessarily like you. Or a competitor to your business  may fix on ruining your online reputation. They can put whatever negative information about you they like for millions to see? Reputation Armor has even seen instances were a malicious porn or hate site was built that is made to look like it is associated with r our clients name or business. What do you think the outcome of this was when potential clients Googled their name?

This is actually a bona fide problem that Reputation Armor observes more often than one might think. Owning all of the potential deviations of your domains goes a long way in proactively guard your brand and online reputation.

Reputation Armor takes things a step further for our clients. We utilize the domains by building actual web sites. When anyone searches their name/companyName, they find a Google results page filled with relevant, positive links.

Reputation Armor advises clients that it is best to take an “Own it before there is a problem” approach. Optimistically there problems would never arrive, but realistically they often do.

Suppressing Negative Reviews

Reputation Armor is aware that Yelp has found itself somewhat under fire lately. There have been unrelenting rumors, and now lawsuits, that the site compresses negative reviews as a way to persuade companies to advertise on the site. Yelp has sturdily denied these rumors, yet they seem to remain. Regardless of Yelp’s denials, having these rumors constantly in the air challenges the integrity of the entire site.

While At the Same Time Suppressing Positive Reviews?

Reputation Armor has also heard from our clients that after declining a request to purchase advertising on Yelp, a number of positive reviews from their business’ listing on the reviews site mysteriously disappeared, downgrading the company’s rating on the site.

Reputation Armor is beginning to question whether any of the content on Yelp can actually be trusted. We see fake complaints on review sites daily. These negative results harm the online reputation of the businesses that they address. To think that companies and individuals have to fight against this sort of thing, not only from disgruntled ex-employees and competitors, but the actual review site itself, is astounding.

What do you think?

Reputation Armor notes that with information spreading like wildfire on the Internet, individuals and companies trying to protect their brands need to stay up to date on their online reputation management. The popularity of blogs and forums allow ample opportunities for fake reviews and illegitimate complaints to spoil a brand’s reliability overnight. Also, negative publicity, whether true or false, appear in search results whether someone is searching for it or not. For this reason Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) wants our potential clients to understand the importance of proactive online reputation management.

Here are a few proactive online reputation management tips from Reputation Armor that any company/individual should consider when building their online brand:

Use social networking to your advantage—Social networking sites are enormously popular to people as well as search engines. Reputation Armor suggests that building pages on sites, such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, and update them regularly with good relevant content.

Issue regular press releases—Press releases are a very efficient way to spawn interest and announce new products and promotions. Just make sure that they are newsworthy. Reputation Armor utilizes press releases on a weekly basis for our clients.

Produce videos—After just a few years since its inception, YouTube is known around the world. Make the most of the power of that awareness by producing videos about your brand(s), uploading them to YouTube, and embedding them on your site. Some suggestions from Reputation Armor are: DIY videos, demonstrations, or new uses your product—the higher the quality the better it will speak of the brand’s credibility.

Host a blog on the company website—Then update it frequently with topical content that connects your visitors. Use the blog to gain priceless feedback from your customers or update them about what’s new. Blog posts also rank highly in search results. Reputation Armor employs the use of many blogs for our customers as well as maintaining a few of our own(like this one)

Include social bookmarking tools—Place them at the bottom of each blog post. The salient point here is: Make it as simple as possible for your viewers to share your content. This will increase targeted traffic to your site and build brand recognition for small or no investment.

Although this  is just a short list of tips from Reputation Armor, all of them are realistic, economical, and make a good deal of impact on proactive online reputation management. They get your name out, build brand recognition. Reputation Armor(ReputationArmor.com) recognizes that negative publicity can happen to any company/individual, whether it’s justified or not, but following the previous tips can lower the potential impact of negative publicity.

For more information on Proactive Online Reputation Management, Contact Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com)  @ 888-358-2766

Schemes and SEO are not really terms that go together.  SEO is not about scheming, despite what some SEO firms may tell you.  Rather, SEO is about a set of processes, both onsite and offsite, that work together to “prove to” Google, Yahoo and Bing  that your website should be ranked higher than the others for a particular keyword or phrase.  Whether you call them tricks or processes or techniques, here are some effective SEO steps that Reputation Armor use that actually make a difference:

• Page Title
  There are a variety of metatags at the very top of a web site’s source code, usually Title, Description and Keyword tags. Out of these, the title carries the most weight in the indexing of your website with search engines. When a search engine is looking to determine what a particular page is about, that’s what it’s going to look for (not to mention being the first thing that visitors will see when they look at your search engine listing). Reputation Armor recommends sticking a keyword or two in the title tag (but not so many that it looks like spam to a search engine). Place your company name at the end of the title and that particular page’s title with keywords in the beginning of the title.
• H1 Headers
  Headers are what help users and search engines both know what the key points of that page are going to be. Put in an H1 tag, and further break down the copy with H2 and H3 tags. Reputation Armor notes that not only will that break up the copy on the page, but it will also let search engines know what’s on the page and give priorities to the content that will assist in indexing the site appropriately.
• Alt Descriptions
  Search engines love descriptive images. Putting alt descriptions on the images give relevant text that search engines can recognize when indexing the site. Remember that the more relevant text you have on the page, the better your chances are in search engine rankings.
• Titles for Links
  Reputation Armor uses the same standard that applies for images here. Text that describes the link that you are about to click helps users and search engines both.
• Relevant & Unique Content
  Reputation Armor shouldn’t have to reinforce the obvious here, but making your content vivid, attractive and understandable isn’t enough (even though it’s very important). Just make it natural, relaxed and relevant, both to users and to Google.
• Good Links
  High-quality links are essential to getting traffic and getting a high page rank. Blogs, social media and other niche links are vital to your page rank. Reputation Armor builds a give-and-take with other related sites, but steers clear of link farms  spam like sites that can actually push down your page rank and kill your legitimacy with visitors.
• Flash and Html
  Users love Flash animation; search engines don’t. If you’ve got to have Flash on your site, make sure that you have an HTML equivalent side-by-side with it. And if you’ve got to have a Flash or splash page on your landing page, include a “skip intro” option, links to your main site content or sitemap. Reputation Armor observes that not only do splash landing pages confuse search engines, they’ve become so cliché’ that they annoy visitors as well.
• Webmaster Tools
  Google, Yahoo and Bing have webmaster sections where you can create an account, upload a sitemap and get a glimpse of stats about the crawling of your website. Pull from all this data to optimize your website and your individual pages. This is an essential tool that Reputation Armor uses often.
• Content Management System
  If your site is still built on individual asp, php or html files, switch to a content management system such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. It will make your life much easier and give you a team of tools to promote your site. It will also increase user interaction and reduce the amount of time you spend on updates and changes to your site.

Reputation Armor tip #1

Write the individual or company who posted the negative content an email, or put in a phone call, where you politely explain your situation, and ask if they’d consider removing it.

Legal action is also an option, although only in extreme situations because it can have the reverse effect to that desired, so use very cautiously.

The following techniques assume that since the negative listing cannot be removed, it must be pushed lower in the search results instead.

Reputation Armor tip #2

Build quality links to the sites ranking directly below the negative results in the search, in an effort to boost them above the negative piece. Make sure that the desired keyword terms are in the anchor text of the new links.

Reputation Armor tip #3

Purchase a new domain that includes the keywords you wish to target in the domain name (e.g. reputation-armor.com), put a site on it, and begin endorsing it.

Reputation Armor tip #4

Build social networking profiles using the keyword terms that you want to replace the negative listings. The listings associated with these pages will begin to appear in the search results of major search engines.

Reputation Armor tip #5

Post articles on authoritative sites, using the targeted keywords as the focal point of the article (and in the title tag).

Reputation Armor tip #6

If you do not already have two pages from your site ranking for the specific key word terms being targeted, build another page with slightly different content about the topic, and promote it and include it in your site navigation. Google, Yahoo, MSN all will show two pages from a site in the search results, possibly helping to push the negative listing down further in the search results.

Reputation Armor tip #7

If you own more than one site, consider adding two pages to each of those sites about the topic as well. Then, start link building and promoting those sites.

In some situations, these do-it-yourself tips will help to push the negative listings down in the search results. If you need further help, contact Reputation Armor

Reputation Armor understands the importance of Social Networking Sites. So we would like  to share  the Reputation Armor top 20 list. Rankings bases on popularity as of this month

1 | facebook.com

2 | MySpace

3 | twitter

4 | LinkedIn.com

5 | classmates.com

6 | Ning.com

7 | Bebo.com

8 | HI5.com

9 | Tagged.com

10 | myyearbook.com

11 | Multiply.com

12 | friendster.com

13 | Meetup

14 | BlackPlanet

15 | Gaia Online

16 | Piczo

17 | orkut.com

18 | FotoLog.com

19 | Skyrock.com

20 | badoo.com

To learn more about how to use social networking to manage your online reputation,

contact Reputation Armor @ 888-358-2766

Reputation Armor is aware that getting a first-page Google result is more difficult than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in intricacy, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to intermingled search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down traditional web results that would have otherwise contended for top rankings.

But where most see problems, Reputation Armor finds opportunity. Even though Google’s brand new zeal for video has fashioned more competition for a smaller amount of traditional search results, it has allowed clients of Reputation Armor with video resources to lucratively attain first-page rankings. In fact, Reputation Armor has found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

For more information on Video Search Engine Optimization, Contact Reputation Armor, 888-358-2766

Use the “About” text box to place keyword-dense prose near the top of your Page

Reputation Armor suggests that a key SEO strategy that should be employed on your Facebook Page whenever practicable is placing keyword-dense text as close to the top of the Page as possible. Because Facebook limits where Page owners can place large chunks of text on the default Wall tab of Facebook Pages, the “About” box, in fact, represents the uppermost position in the CSS structure of the page to add custom text.

In order to add text to your Page’s “About” box, click the “Write something about [YourPage]” in the box underneath your Page’s profile picture. You’ll then be able to enter custom text in the input box – there is a 250 character limit, so choose your words wisely.