It hardly needs to be mentioned that you succeed or fail in your marketing by the amount of trust you generate among your target audience in your brand name. A slight chink in the trust may tell adversely on your reputation as an honest businessman and your sales will start falling immediately.

Another reason for a fall in your reputation may be the smear campaign launched by your competitors against you. They may tarnish your name and your business without any valid reason or fault on your part.

This kind of injustice is a common phenomenon in the internet marketing. Your competitor writes just one article against you and submits it to hundreds of directories.

Alternately, your adversary sponsors AdWords ads against your site on the first page of some popular search engine. The ad may be somewhat like this: Be Careful Of This Fraud (keyword). This is sufficient to annul years of hard work put in by you to bring your business to its present level.

Taking steps to maintain and further boost your reputation as an honest businessman in such circumstances is called online reputation management.

One way to persuade your competitor is to request him politely to remove the offending comments and then threaten him with legal action if he still persists. If this tactic also fails, it would be better to fight him out at his own ground, that is, by playing the SEO game with him.

You can try to push the page/site with offensive comments to the second results page of search engine, for example, Google.  This can be achieved through several steps;

1. Push other sites that have lower rank than your competitor’s site above it on the Google research page. Assuming the site with the negative comments against you ranks fourth on Google page, you should try to boost the rank of the sites below it to supersede it to a higher rank.

You can do so by applying SEO techniques. You can, for example, add favorable comments on this site. Book mark it in as many social media sites such as Technocrati, Digg, Delicious etc as possible. You may even write positive reviews about it on the home page of your site by placing links at suitable places.

2. Ask someone you know who commands authority for his site to write a good review for your site and publish the same on your home page saying: What others are saying about us.

3. Create new content and syndicate it through articles, blogs, newsletters, etc for seoing your own site. You may also submit the content for syndication through RSS feeds. In this way you can indirectly persuade the audience to ignore the comments against your site.

4. Create new sub-domains or sister domains of your site. Google often considers the sub-domains as different sites, but they command the same authority as the primary domain. Post preferably new content on the sub-domain site. You need not fill it with hundreds of pages. Just 10-12 pages should suffice.

Reputation management basically involves delivering (sometimes over-delivering) what you promise in terms of quality and quantity. Once this trust is built up, it is difficult for your adversaries to shake it.

So you have a company blog that you’ve just created. It’s practically empty except for one or two posts. It looks bare and you want to take the next step and optimize your blog so that you can build up a consistent flow of traffic. What can you do and where do you go? Widgets are the perfect option to make your company website SMO and SEO friendly. A widget is a small piece of code that you can insert into your website. The code inserts an application or a box that will perform some activity to attract visitors and consumers. There are widgets on the Internet for just about anything and you can find them all over. Widget Box is a website which provides codes that you can insert into your company blog. Widget Box collaborates with a variety of blogs and social networks including Facebook, Twitter, iGoogle, Type Pad, Blogger, Wordpress, My Space, etc. Widget Box actually inserts the code in for you automatically once you direct which social network or blog platform you want to use it on. Widget Box will let you customize the background colors, the size of the application, and test out or preview the application. If you are HTML savvy, It will also give you the code to embed yourself. Did I mention this was a free web 2.0 resource? I will now share with you the top 5 widgets you can insert from Widget Box onto your company blog, to help improve its rankings.

Social Bookmark Buttons. This widget displays all the social bookmarks on your company website. Social Bookmarks include Delicious, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Furl,  Technorati, Magnolia, Stumble Upon and many more. Inserting this widget allows visitors to easily distribute the information they found interesting on your blog by using their social network accounts. Collaborating with social networks will help your social media optimization campaign and will help attract more visitors to your website.

Latest Google News – SEO News Updates. This widget displays a live feed of the latest SEO news updates from Google News. To stay on top of the latest SEO trends this is an extremely helpful application. Visitors would be able to view the topic updates and be able to click on whatever topic interests them and have the full news description open up in a second window. This widget would be ideal for Offshore SEO company websites. There are other widgets also that provide news and updates based upon the industry and topic of interest you choose. There are other widgets that just display SEO information on your website such as the number of visitors on your website, the page rank of your website. Some widgets even categorize the visitors according to which country they are from. If you are able to analyze the countries where you receive most of your company website traffic from, you can accordingly plan your campaign around this useful information and bring in more business.

YouTube Sidebar Widget. The name of the widget basically explains it. The widget after plugging in your YouTube user id information will display the videos you have uploaded on YouTube. Anyone who visits your company blog will be able to also see the videos related to your services and products in the sidebar area. In general, YouTube is a very popular social network.  To allow visitors to interact with your YouTube account, it is a fool proof method of getting consumers to come back and visit your blog  or website again. People are curious to see what others upload on YouTube and would be most likely willing to visit again and check back if you have uploaded any new videos. Videos provide a personal, hands on experience to your followers and consumers, so it is best to take advantage of widgets such as this.



Google Search. Being affiliated with the best search engine on the Internet is always a good thing. Allowing visitors to search the Internet with Google search engine from the convenience of your website will improve the overall quality of your website. This widget will display a Google search bar at the top of your company blog or website for visitors and followers to utilize. This widget also has transparent backgrounds to easily gel with the layout of your website.

Contact Us. What is the most important part of Internet Marketing? Communication. That’s right. So in order to hear back from your visitors and followers you can insert a widget that will display a contact form on the sidebar of your company blog. The contact form allows the visitor to fill in their name, email, subject and message. With this kind of feedback you can fine tune your SEO marketing strategies and use social media optimization to help build traffic for your website. Now that I have gone over some of the important widgets you can utilize from Widget Box, you can also browse the website for other widgets that might be of interest to your company website. There are widgets that insert games, surveys, calorie counters, recipes, movie trailers, songs, podcasts, and much more. The possibilities of what you can incorporate on your website are endless. Make your website Social Media Optimization savvy by allowing followers and users to connect to their social networks through a variety of widgets.

I decided to write this article as a result of many e-mails. It seems more and more people are victims of bad SEO. The main complaint is that they are paying entirely too much for little or no results. In addition, many are in the grip of bad SEO practices. If you plan to rent a pro SEO in the future, I suggest you use this article as a set of guidelines.

Before going to any person or business Seo Services , proceed as follows:

A) Learn how to set up and tested an SEO firm before you negotiate.

Do they have a strong client list under their belt?

Are they published?

B) Consider their portfolios.

What kind of results have they produced?

Contact a few of their customers. Are they satisfied with the work done?

C) To review and confirm their methods?

How are they going to optimize your site to access your keywords?

Did they use organic methods? Some individuals or companies use doorway pages, hide text in the background, use the re-orients the blacklist and other methods. Stay away from these values.

D) Get at least three different proposals for SEO.

Look carefully each. Are there any similarities? Proposals will help you to see which companies are honest and who are trying to sell you something you do not need.

What is the cost? The cheapest is not always the best, however, the highest price may not be attached to a comprehensive and viable course of action. Try to find to find a person or organization that will give you what you want in your SEO budget.

E) of the contract, contract, contract.

Get everything in writing. Search on the document carefully. Make sure it covers everything you mentioned, including methods of achieving your desired results. Have copies signed by the two sides. If employment is a big, you may want to consult a lawyer.

F) Clearly state the terms of payment.

While most SEO shall do no work for free or agree to a salary scale for results, many SEO professionals will not shy away from a more performance series of incentives. I am not a strong supporter prepaid contracts .. Most SEO professionals will abide by the 50% front, 50% on completion norm. Make sure that all the financial terms are clearly set out in your contract that the real work. This will protect all parties involved in a case where the expectations are not met.

In all, try to do your best to educate you on SEO. Have a basic knowledge of the terminology and SEO Expert SEO methodology. Anyone offering SEO should not have a problem explaining how they intend to achieve results. If they fail earn your trust or raise a red flag for whatever reason, keep searching. You will eventually find someone who will help you achieve your goals for a fair price. Happy hunting.

Search Engines are extremely unbiased and democratic in nature. If you have the right keywords, content, links and structure, you stand a fair chance to be ranked high, like your competitors, or the people who are out to cause harm. Therefore, by using SEO techniques, you can make the damaging comments ‘disappear’ from the top results on SERPs.

Rememeber, SEO is like a watchdog for your brand. All this while, it has been driving web traffic to your site and helping you make money. Now, you can use it as a powerful tool to fight back negative and undesirable comments.

Start with the Keywords

There is no way that one can play down the importance of keywords for reputation management. If you’ve already optimized your website using a set of keywords, you will have to use different keywords to fight the current problem. Now, focus on those keywords that are creating the maximum ripples and turn them around to your benefit.

Using those “negative” keywords or a specific product name, make a lot of relevant and high quality content. By doing this, you create a good press for the offending keywords and boost the ranks for your website, thereby making an effort to push the damaging pages out of the top few SERPs.

Other SEO Tips

Employ professional bloggers to put up posts about you. Try to organize podcasts and news interviews online for your product or brand. Exchange links with relevant websites Try to buy as many domains as you can, ensuring that they focus on your target keywords Monopolize the PPC spots on major Search Engines. Join social networking sites and participate in fruitful conversations and discussions Hire a good SEO company India