StepRep Blog

The fellas at the far end of the hall have just wrapped up another round of tweaks to StepRep. Most of the changes they made were in the “back end” – that is, they’re invisible to schmoes like you and me. But they also made a couple of “front end” changes that will affect – for the better! – the way you and I interact with the product.

For instance,

1. In the past you might have created a new search and were annoyed to discover that StepRep didn’t allow you to save it. That’s because, for the present, users are limited to creating 5 searches at a time. Now there’s a handy error message to explain what’s going on when your sixth search gets snuffed out.

2. The numbers next to the menu on the left, showing how many stories you have in each category, used to be a little sluggish to update. Now those numbers will change immediately when you move a story from one category to another.

3. You know your StepRep public profile? Wait, you didn’t know that you had a StepRep public profile? That’s probably because you had to dig around in the settings to find the link. Now the profile link is prominently displayed at the top of the screen, where users are more likely to stumble across it…and maybe now that they know it’s there, they’ll start filling out their profile with information about themselves and their business.

4. Speaking of your public profile, it’s been redesigned. If you’d like to see what it looks like now, I’ll modestly provide my own page as an example. It’s nothing fancy, but the profile page is designed to be super easy for search engines to find and index. For example, as of February 12, if you Google my name, my StepRep profile page comes up fourth in the results. My profile page, in turn, points search engines toward the stories that I’ve chosen to promote using the StepRep widget.

5. One more thing about the public profile: we’ve changed the URL. I don’t quite understand the technical reasons, but apparently the new URL is a little Google-friendlier than the old one. If you’re using the StepRep widget on your blog or website (and if you’re not, why aren’t you?), you might want to re-install it so it points to the new URL. But if you don’t feel like re-installing, no worries, the old link will redirect to the new location.

6. Are you a StepRep user from outside the US and Canada? If so, you were undoubtedly irritated at sign-up time by the fact that your home country wasn’t available in the drop-down box when you selected your location. We apologise for the inconvenience. For new users, we’ve created a comprehensive list of countries for the drop-down box. And if you’ve already signed up using a fake address, you can now go into your settings and select your actual country from the list. So all you users in the South Sandwich Islands can stop with the hate mail, already!

Just a quick note to everyone using StepRep(Beta) that we’ll be performing a data migration this morning that will require a couple hours of downtime.

Thanks for your patience and we’ll be back up ASAP.

Reputation not just what you say about yourself, but more and more importantly, what others say about you. In the previous 2 posts I discussed building a search profile for yourself. Today, I’ll build on that a bit. If my first statement is true, which I think it is, then it’s not enough to just promote stories about yourself. You need and want people to find stories and comments that other people have written about you.

Today, social media has opened up a new era of transparency. People are cynical about marketers. You know those old testimonials that we used to put on all of our websites from “Bob Jones in Chicago”. Those ones with no link to Bob, his email or any information that Bob was a real guy and his testimonial was real. Those don’t have a lot of impact anymore. Thus it is important to promote verifiable comments, opinions, recommendations and views about you and/or your business by 3rd parties. These are more legitimate when they come from a 3rd party and they are published on a 3rd party site.

So when I promote all of my own profiles to increase their collective search rank, I also link to and mention stories, articles and comments about me on other sites so those rise higher in the search results for my name.

StepRep helps this process first by helping you find comments and stories about you. It helps you find them early and allows you to comment on things in a timely manner. You’ll often want to reply to comment and stories whether they are positive or negative. StepRep further helps promote these stories by putting all of the good ones on your StepRep profile. As you promote this profile, the links to your good stories become more and more valuable. An easy way to promote your StepRep profile is to place the StepRep widget on your other sites and profiles. It rolls through your good stories and it links back to your profile.

In the end, you want a good mix of results when someone Googles your name. You want some of your websites and personal profiles to show up and you want 3rd party comments and stories to show up.

In the last post, we talked a little about the basics of linking. It’s important to understand how pages show up in search. So by building your online search profile, we’re talking about making it easy for people to find you and managing what people see when they search for you. If your name is rare, you’ll have an easy time. If your name if John Smith, you have some work cut out for you!

I’ll use myself as an example right now. If you search for Jeff Tomlin, most of the results on the first 2 pages of Google will either be my online profiles or articles about me. I’ve achieved that primarily by linking my profiles together. That is, on most of those profiles and websites, I list all of my other profiles. Next, I link to other articles about me on my blog. This gives rank to those other articles about me. Lastly, I try to list my sites and profiles on other 3rd party sites, directories, blogs and news.

There are a few things to note. Let’s go through the list of link attributes I mentioned in the last post.

1.Page Rank of the Linking Pages

I have about 12 personal sites and profiles that I link together. Each one I add means they will all generate another link. But linking them together isn’t enough. Each profile needs to have independent incoming links. I can’t write for and market all of these profiles effectively so first I syndicate content to some of them. An example of this is friendfeed. It aggregates content that I’ve posted from my other accounts and thus it updates regularly, but I never really go to the site. Secondly, I really focus on building a small number of them. As I market 2 or 3 of them, their individual rank goes up. As they build popularity, the links from those 2 or 3 to my other profiles carry more weight.

2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page

To maximize the value of the links I have to each of my profiles, I manage the total number of links on my linking pages. To do this, I simply ensure that I don’t populate my pages with links to too many other websites.

3.The Topic of the Linking Page

I want to maximize the topical importance of my linking pages. This is one reason I’ve created so many different online profiles. Each profile or website is about me, Jeff Tomlin. Thus when I link to all of my other sites, the link is highly relevant. Google now recognizes that these sites are all about the same person.

4.The Text of the Link

When I link to one of my sites or profiles, I use proper link text. The key is to ensure the link is descriptive, yet optimal from a search engine point of view. That is, you want to describe what the link actually links to, and you want link relevant value from the text. So I’ve formatted links to my profiles including a short name of the profile along with my name. An example is: “Jeff Tomlin – Linkedin”. A good clue to use is to try and make the link text similar to the title of the page you are linking to.

5.Reputation of the Linking Site

I always ensure that I don’t engage in linking schemes. I am careful of the sites I link to and I only promote my sites to other reputable sites. This happen naturally when you market yourself with ethical online practices.