StepRep Blog

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.

Today, people Google each other on a regular basis. If you have a job interview, the employer has Googled you. If you offer a service, your prospective customers have Googled you before they phoned. If you have an introductory business meeting, the other party has likely researched you online. This is why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is critical today. While ORM is a broader topic, what we’re talking about right now is managing the Google-ability of your name, or rather, how easy it is to find you on Google and what people will see – your Google profile if you will. Now of course this discussion includes other search engines, but Google has become the verb ‘to search’ now so I’ll keep referring to Google. I’m going to split this discussion into 2 posts and focus on the background that links play in search for this post. The next post, I’ll get into actually building your profile.

The topic on how links work is rather old news to many, but complicated enough to leave many others still in the dark. I’m going to discuss this at a high level. Google ranks the relevance of a page by many factors. In general, a page is ranked based on it’s topical relevance to a keyword search and how many links point to that page. The most important factor would be the links a page has pointing to it. Here is what makes a link valuable:

1.The Page Rank (PR) of the Page the Link is From

The more popular a page is, the more valuable links from that page will be. Google has a patented algorithm that calculates the popularity of a page. You can see the page rank of a page using the Google toolbar on a scale of 1-10. This number is not the actual PR that Google uses, but it shows you the ballpark popularity of a page.

The idea here is that if you receive a link from a well established, popular page, that link will give your site more value than a brand new page or a page with few or no links pointing to it.

2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page

The value of a link on a page is diluted by the total number of other links on that page. For example, if a page has a page rank of 5 and there is only one outgoing link on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5. But if there are 99 other links on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5/100.

3.The Topic of the Linking Page

This point is simple. If my blog is all about real estate in Denver, a link from another Denver real estate site (or page) is more valuable than a link from a casino site.

4.The Text of the Link

This is a big one. Link text matters a lot. So a link to my Denver real estate site that looks like this: Denver Real Estate, is a lot better than a link that is formatted like this: click here.

5.The Reputation of the Linking Site

This relates to point three. Google gives websites a relative weighting based on the links they attract and the sites they link to. The idea is that they recognize the types of ‘neighbourhoods’ you associate with. So if a link comes from a site with a good reputation, the link will carry more weight than a link from a spammy site. For clarity, if a site is linking to other low value sites and receives links from those sites, its links will carry less value than a site that is being linked to from CNN, Yahoo, educational institutions etc.

Take a look here for a more in-depth discussion on building links:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002357.html

In the next post, I’ll use some more examples of the above concepts and show you how to build out a strong profile to increase the Googlability of your name.