Negative results in the top 10 SERPS for your brand name? Want to move those negative results down to page 3+ but aren’t sure where to get started? Here’s a simple primer.

1. After you’ve figured out that yes, this is a negative result from an issue that has since been resolved (closed lawsuit, one time complaint from an ex employee/client/competitor, etc) and not an open product or service issue that needs to be addressed, the next step is to analyze the negative results. Is your brand name/keyword in the title tag and url? What is the PageRank of the site? How many links are pointing to the page that is ranking? How many links are pointing to the domain that is ranking? What are the PageRanks of those links? What is the anchor text of those links? Doing some research in the beginning will set the groundwork for figuring out how difficult it will be to move down the negative results and what types of links, sites, and profiles you’ll need to create in order to rank positive and neutral sites higher than the negative results.

2. Find sites that are neutral and/or positive that aren’t ranking on page 1 yet. There might be some great sites out there that have both age (published years ago), PageRank (domain or page), and links that just need a few great links pushed towards them in order to rank high for your keyword. To find some of these sites, follow these steps:

1. Search for your keyword and look at the results on pages 2, 3, 4 all the way to 10+. I’ve seen pages rise up quickly in the ranks that were PageRank 0 but had a high domain PageRank and links and just needed some additional links to the appropriate page. The fact that those sites are already ranking within a few pages for your keyword means that it has the possibility of moving up, it just needs the extra push.

2. Use search operators like inurl:keyword (such as inurl:rachel kuptz) and intitle:keyword. You may find some news sites or even pages on your own site that have a great PageRank and just need to be optimized a bit more and have some links pushed towards them.

3. Create sites. Break out your career, news, charity, blog, locations pages to be their own mini sites or even just subdomains of your site (careers.company.com). You’ll see this often in larger companies when you type their names in the search engines where the results show the company site first, then a number of subdomain and landing page sites in the following results.

4. Create profiles on other sites. Sites like Twitter, Facebook Pages, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn company pages all rank high for your name/company name when optimized properly, linked up, and are updated on a semi regular basis.

Ready to tackle the search engine optimization of your site, begin an AdWords campaign for one of your products or services, or clean up your search engine result pages (serps)? There are a variety of SEO and PPC agencies, freelancers, and services in Michigan that can be available to help you manage your campaigns, but what if you want to learn or take on the SEO efforts on your own?

Even if you want to outsource your SEO or PPC efforts to a reputable agency or freelancer, I would always advise that you take the time to understand the basics yourself. If you understand the basics, it can help you to find and interview the best agencies to ensure that they know what they’re doing (and be careful of the bait and switch — if you’re hiring an agency, interview the people that will be *working* on  your campaign. Make sure you have an opt out in case that person leaves the agency and an agency shuffle leaves  you with a newbie as well.)

I learned what I know about SEO, Pay Per Click/search engine marketing, and Online Reputation Management through working at agencies and trying everything out that I read on blogs and forums.

If you’re really interested in learning from experts, conferences are a great way to go, but that can get expensive. Some conferences that I have attended and would recommend include:

• Affiliate Summit
• Search Engine Strategies
• Search Marketing Expo
• Pubcon

If reading and guides are more of your thing, I would start with sites like:

• SEOmoz
• Search Engine Land
• Sphinn
• SEOBook
• AffBuzz
• Webmaster World
• Keyword Academy

These sites publish posts on a daily basis and are made up of professionals who are regularly working on sites and are the first to know when changes are happening. Some of the sites are blogs, others are news/rss feeds, and others are forums and membership sites.

Of those sites, if you need more hands on help than just reading a post, SEOBook has a forum ($300+/month) that is really credible and you can ask any questions you want — it’s the industry leader for learning SEO. SEOMoz has some free and paid guides, and The Keyword Academy is great for learning how to choose keywords that will bring in traffic but that aren’t overly competitive and teaches you how to rank for those keywords (without the technical info).

Same thing with affiliate marketing — if you’re interested in learning, start reading sites like AffBuzz and attending conferences like Affiliate Summit. Professionals that make an income from affiliate marketing regularly share their tests and findings through various blog posts and via conference sessions.

I’ve used Unique Article Wizard for over a year now. In the past few months, however, I haven’t been making use of it enough to justify the monthly expense of $67. I’ve been looking at and testing a few alternatives, and so far, there are a few that I like and am considering using *instead* of UAW.

Unique Article Wizard vs. Other Article Marketing Programs

Unique Article Wizard is, well, unique, in the sense that your article is distributed to a number of blogs and sites related to your niche. You write and re-write an optimized article 3 times, then UAW takes that article and the versions of that article and distributes it to sites that have opted in to the system. One article can end up being posted on over 500 sites if you have a general category (say finance, for example). Those articles contain a link back to your site via the “About the Author” paragraph, and if the article is posted on high ranking or relevant site, that can lead to traffic and rankings.

The negative part of UAW is that a lot of the sites that your articles are posted on aren’t highly trafficked, have low in bound links and PageRank, and are just spammy made-for-adsense sites. You may get a lot of links, but those links don’t end up being very beneficial in the long wrong — quantity over quality in this situation. For some long tail, non competitive keywords, UAW can work wonders. If you are looking to start an online reputation management campaign for a name or specific product related keyword that doesn’t have much competition, UAW can be helpful in pushing links to optimized sites and profiles that may otherwise not receive many in-bound links organically.

Other article marketing sites, such as Ezine Articles or GoArticles, allow you to post an article and then allow others to copy and repost that article, keeping your author profile and links in tact. This method can sometimes lead to better quality links to your sites and, in some situations, the article on those sites will rank highly, but you won’t receive as many links. Quality over quantity with those types of sites (although quality can sometimes be argued here, as well).

Alternatives to Unique Article Wizard

ASHelper and Article Submitter

Both of these free, downloadable applications let you upload your article, author bio, links, categories, and other information, save the article, then submit to a number of article submission sites, including the popular ones like GoArticles and Ezine Articles. For those sites that require registration, both programs allow you to also save that information. These programs make it easy to submit articles to some of the more credible article submission sites in a short time, instead of having to go to each site separately.

Article Submission Helper | Article Submitter

Distribute Your Articles

Similar to Unique Article Wizard in the way that they distribute articles to blogs and networks, but this is more of a community than UAW. Worth checking out if UAW has stopped working for you. 3 different plans, rangingn from $34.99/month to $129.99/month

Distribute Your Articles

I’ve been working with Facebook Advertising since late 2008 — 10/19/2008 to be exact. My first ads went to a Facebook Fan Page in order to increase my fan base and be able to market to those fans over the long term.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of testing and figured out a few tricks and things that do and don’t work.

It’s not super easy to get a direct sale via Facebook ads, although I have had success selling affiliate products via Facebook. A person isn’t searching for your product when the come across your ad, you’ve just targeted them (hopefully through relevant means) as a prospect because of interests or demographics listed in their profile. I’ve found, for most of my products and advertisers, that Facebook is best for promoting your brand to a very targeted audience (branding), capturing their data via a Facebook Fan Page “like,” email list or newsletter, or as a lead in general (subscribe to rss feed/enter a contest and capture email/etc), and then keeping them updated with relevant content and promoting your product/service through your sites or newsletter/email list.

Create Multiple Versions of Ads

When I start off with a new campaign, I always make multiple versions of each ad in order to test different variables. First, I create 5-10 ads with the same headline, ad copy, and targeting but different images. After I run those ads for a day or two, I pause the under performing images. Next, I’ll take the 2 or 3 best performing images and create multiple versions of those, keeping the ad copy and targeting the same but with different headlines. After that, I”ll start testing ad copy, and finally, targeting. With targeting, I usually start off really general (location and age range) then start narrowing it down (cities, specific ages, interests, etc).

Start With CPC

I’ve found that it’s best to usually start with CPC ads. With CPC, you’re pretty much guaranteed clicks (unless your ad or targeting is horrible), which is great for testing. Once you have an ad and targeting that you know is getting a great CTR and converting well (whether your conversions are leads or sales), you can then change your ads to CPM. You really have to keep an eye on CPM campaigns, however — if you don’t, you can end up spending your daily budget without a single click. Shoemoney discusses this, and more, in his free video, Facebook Advertising Soup to Nuts Guide.

Test Images and Make Them Stand Out

Your image will have a lot of white space around it, is going to be 110×80, and will be grouped into a pack of 3 or 4 ads on the right side of someone’s Facebook page. Real photos, images with borders, photoshopped/edited photos — those stand out and tend to get clicked over images that are stock photos or bland. You’ll have to change out your images fairly often, though — once your image/ad is shown to your target audience (inventory) a number of times, you’ll see your clicks starting to go down. The easiest way to refresh your CTR (for a limited time before having to change out your targets) is to change out your image on your best performing ads.

Note: According to a study (shown in Shoemoney’s Facebook Advertising Soup to Nuts Guide), top images clicked on had either cleavage, a recognizable brand name, or were blended images.

Make Use of The Reporting Features

Facebook ads have a reporting tool that you can make use of. One of the the reports I run frequently is “Responder Demographics.” In this report, it will break down the demographics, sex, age group, and location of the people that clicked on your ad. From one of my ads that was just in the beginning testing stages and was being served to both men and women, all ages over 18, and in the U.S., the reporting tool told me that the majority of people who clicked on those ads were males, 18-24, who lived in California, New York, or Illinois. I also found from the reporting that males over 45 made up less than .1% of the click thrus. From that data, I created a sub-campaign that was targeted only to males, split up into age groups of 18-24, 35-34, and 34-44, and ran in the states that had the highest CTR. I still ran the general campaign to test out different items, but I put a larger budget towards the new, targeted campaign and was able to spend a lower cost per click for more clicks (the campaign eventually switched to CPM once I was confident in my targeting). Without that reporting data, I may have continued to paid a higher cpc, targeting to age groups and locations that weren’t clicking and were costing me more, for a longer time before figuring out via testing who my specific target should be.

Test Headlines

With any ad copy, testing the body copy and headline is usually a given. With Facebook Ads, however, I’ve found that different techniques work for each demographic you’re targeting. Some headlines that have performed well for me include:

Questions: One ad that performed extremely well for me asked “Are You Fun?” The ad asked a question but also spoke to the product I was selling (bachelorette party goods). I tested the headline by creating another ad, with the same body copy and image, asking “Are You Boring?” Turns out, “Are You Boring?” worked better than “Are You Fun?”, but I would have never known that if I had been content with the CTR of my first ad.

Speak to a Timely Matter: I’ve run ads that were associated with movies, holidays, and events that had a great CTR — for a limited time. When the movie Sex and the City 2 was about to come out, I ran an ad to a cocktail related site that provided recipes relevant to the movie.

Be Totally Vague: This one is my favorite. It works. It’s annoying, but it works. For a poker site, I ran a headline with a quote that said “I’m Not The Sucker.” The ad copy read a quote from the Poker movie “Rounders.” If you target the right people, they’ll get the idea of what the ad is supposed to be about (poker in this instance), but you’re not directly telling them WHY you want them to click on the ad, or what you’re even promoting, and that gets some people’s attention. You have to be careful with this one…

Link Ads To A Facebook Page Customized Tab

Facebook is always switching things up when it comes to advertising. They recently removed the “Estimated Impressions” counter that used to appear on the bottom of the advertising page once you entered in all of your targeting information, and in the past few weeks, they’ve made the “Like” button appear only under ads that go to a Facebook Fan page, while ads that take a person off Facebook have the URL mentioned underneath the ad.

You’ll have to do testing based on your conversion goals, but with a custom Facebook tab, you can still collect email addresses for leads (newsletters, follow ups, etc), or count a lead as a “Like.”

I wasn’t originally planning on participating in HAPPO from the job seeker perspective, but after seeing all of the amazing tweets and posts today, I was inspired to join in.

While my degree is in Public Relations, my career has led me down the SEO and Internet marketing route. Since 2004, I have worked in a variety of search engine optimization, pay per click, and online reputation management roles for corporations and agencies, eventually going full time as a freelancer/consultant in early 2009.

For the past year, I’ve solely focused on online reputation management and Pay Per Click  jobs. I’ve worked with PR firms and individual clients to manage negative press that appears online about companies, business people, and products. It can be a fairly controversial subject, but I help companies to push down negative results for specific keywords by optimizing positive and neutral results through SEO and link building tactics. I work through PR agencies that have already gone through the crisis management steps with a client, companies that have been cleared from lawsuits that still appear online in top ranking positions, and individuals that are haunted by negative comments left on a blog.

While most negative press cannot be removed and will always show up in top rankings for specific keyword searches, there are certain cases where an ORM campaign is crucial – a negative web site showing up as the #2 result for a company name, a negative article showing up about a person with a similar product/name/company that clients start associating with you, or a lawsuit that has since been settled yet still shows as negative.

While it’s beneficial for clients to work with PR firms to solve their overall reputation issues, I can assist with one part of that equation – the online portion. Through methods such as link building, web site creation, profile optimization, and positive online press, negative results can be pushed down to page 3+ for specific keywords, including company names.

I’m hoping that through this post, I can be of help to PR firms that would like to offer ORM as a service. The PR community has been extremely helpful to me in the past, so even if you’re not interested at this time, I am more than happy to answer questions about ORM for those who would like to understand it better or that have smaller clients and just need a quick answer.

For more information on orm services, please visit online reputation management