Using Pinterest For Online Reputation Management

Using Pinterest for reputation management is a topic that has been overlooked in the current buzz around this social photo site. If you are a brand or an individual looking to control the search engine results (SERPs) around your name, Pinterest as well as other social photo sharing sites can be an effective tool.

Let’s use Pinterest as our example in leveraging social photo sites for reputation management. Pinterest is currently ranked as the 16th most popular site in the United States and 62nd globally (Alexa). With over 11 million unique monthly users and an average time on site of 98 minutes per month (TechCrunch), you can see why we are going to leverage this site.

So to start, if you have not already set up an account on Pinterest you can request an invite directly from the site. The invites are currently taken up to two days to get confirmed. Once in, you are ready to start to build upon you current online reputation.

I have been testing a couple of things on Pinterest to familiarize myself with their service and what I found was that a properly optimized “Board” (think of it in terms of a bulletin board) or “Pin” (this would be the individual post) can quickly show up in the Google SERPs for your targeted keywords. However, I have not seen the same thing in Bing or Yahoo as of yet. So this example will help you cannibalize the Google SERPs for your personal name or company name. Here is my strategy for online reputation management using Pinterest.

When setting up you account I strongly suggest that you use your proper business name in the First Name field. I found that Pinterest does not have a character limit on the First Name field. Also create a username that matches your brand, but is not too long for people not to remember it. For example Martha Stewart Weddings Middle East uses the username MSWME. For individuals, use your first and last name that you have consistently used online. The “About” section on the initial profile has a 450 character limit (includes spaces). Create a concise company overview or bio using your targeted keywords within this character limit.

Image by Flickr

When setting up a Board on Pinterest you need to keep in mind that the Board name will be used as the page title as well as in the H1 page heading. So use your official company name or proper name when creating your Board. You will also be able to create a Board description. The Board description has a maximum character length of 500 (includes spaces) and it will be used within the Open Graph description tag. So I recommend that you create a concise business overview or a bio using your targeted keywords. Don’t just copy and paste it from the “About” section, modify it a bit to create additional unique content. Once that is set up you will need to edit the Board and choose a category. If you are setting this up for a company, choose the best category that matches closest to your industry. If you are setting this up for a personal brand, choose either the “People” or “My Life” category.

With the initial set up of the Board you can go ahead and start adding Pins to it. So let’s say you are a law firm, you could add a Pin for each of the lawyers in the office to assist in their own online reputation management. You could add client testimonials to the board. You can add your press releases (those that have images). The possibilities are pretty endless, but you want to keep in mind that this Board should be focused on your brand name and that you should be using your brand name within the descriptions of each Pin. If you are an individual you can Pin your work portfolio, sites that you have designed, or even other social network profiles that you previously created to defend your online reputation.

What other ways have you used Pinterest to enhance your own online reputation?

Guest Post Provided by Brent Nau an Internet Marketing Consultant with Advanced Medical, a physical therapy staffing company.

Google Testing New Horizontal Map

Wanted to share with you a new test that Google was doing by changing the vertical maps to a “Horizontal Map” for the Local Searches

What I found also that this test affected also Brand search with a Local Map Enabled:

I think these changes have multiple implications on Adwords (now ads are higher on the right sidebar). One more quick note i noticed that i did try multiple searches to trigger the blended search and couldn’t see a blended search with the new map.

If Page Extensions Changes from .html to .php

Got a question lately where a friend of mine is moving his site from a static HTML website to a .php website. One of his questions where if he needed to add a redirect from his Old URLs to his New URLs, where the the only changing part in his URL structure is the Extension. For Example:

• Old Url: /wissam-dandan.html
• New URL: /wissam-dandan.php

How to Implement rel = author on WordPress Blog

Howdy!

As my first blog post on my personal blog, I will start it with the reason that let me setup and launch my personal blog, the Authorship markup.Google has gifted all authors a rel=author markup in search results. this will help searches discover great content.

To identify the author of a blog or article, Google checks for a connection between the content page (such as an article), an author page, and a Google Profile. Authorship markup uses the rel attribute (part of the open HTML5 standard) in links to indicate the relationship between a content page and an author page (** Authorship markup)

To implement it in my blog, I create a an “About me” and i used custom menus to be able to add the rel=”author” in the href linking to my about page. to do so you need to:

• Create About you page
• Go to Menus under Appearance
• Create a Menu, click Save
• Check the “About me” page in the left column and click “Add to menu”
• In this step you have to click “Screen Options” on top and check “Link Relationship (XFN)”

• now go to the “about me”  showing in the Menu and click the small down arrow
• fill the rel box with “author”.

• Now while you write your About page make sure that every social profile, author page on a different blog and your Google + profile. you need to add a rel=”me” in every link.
• in this final step go to Google Rich Snippet testing tool

and Voila !! The connection is verified, and now basically you have to wait for Google spiders to recrawl your website and do their work.

One last important note is in the you need to fill out this form, in case you missed something in the implementation of the authorship markup.