Nowadays, online reputation management has become a very important aspect of winning projects, getting more clients or being recruited. To investigate one person, the first common place people will mostly pass by is Google. Then it would be useful if you can control as many of the top listings about yourself as possible. These listings should be ideally the professional profile, company pages, media mentions or similarities. To do that, a good SEO strategy will definitely help to optimize your “brand” in a positive way and to help ensure the ranking as highly as possible in search engines
By starting the SEO strategy from identifying your strengths and capitalizing on them, people can get their online personal brand highlighted by utilizing every media available to spread the word about the “brand”. Nowadays, small businesses and individuals can expand its horizons drastically and effectively by taking advantage of social social media networking websites, which are mostly free of charge, such as YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, Flikr, My Space and Facebook. Here is an illustration on which and how popular social networking sites can contribute to your personal branding strategy:
Keeping that in mind, it is agreed that social networking sites, are valuable resources and tools for online brand building at an extremely low cost. Nevertheless, the issue is how to take advantage of their power to benefit your brand. Here are the tips:
- Blogging and Guest Blogging
A blog is an excellent way to generate positive personal content that will turn up in searches. A professional and trusted blog can strengthen your company, attract customers, build reputation within an industry and, through your profile page, show who you are. If hundreds or even thousands of people are subscribing to read your content and expert opinions, then this is clearly something you want searchers to find when they come looking for you online.
However, having your personal blog may not be enough, even if you update the content regularly and keep it fresh. Posting additional articles on similar and related websites can be even more beneficial. You can reach a wider audience and enhance your online reputation.
Based on similar concepts to blogging, Twitter is also a great way to improve your SEO. By following relevant users and providing valuable tweets, your trusted profile page will be highly regarded in the search engines. If potential clients are looking for more information about you, then a Twitter profile containing expert advice and related conversations is going to help strengthen your reputation in the eyes of the searcher.
It has become popular and effective to build your personal brand on business social media networking sites such as Linkedin and Plaxo, where people can show a professional profile containing career history, skills and networks of employers, colleages and industry professionals. From being largely used to reconnect with past co-workers and trusted colleagues in the past, LinkedIn now has extended its capabilities to serve as a brand building platform for professionals looking to network, engage, and communicate with like-minded peers. Visible public profile, editable URLs and ‘inbound links’ (links to Linkedin profile from other websites) can help to optimize your profile and improve the SEO easily.
- Online Presentations
Workshops, seminars, and conferences are a great way to impress potential business partners and clients. Uploading your presentations on sites, such as SlideShare and Scribd will allow viewers to download and review your speeches and supporting documents. It will also give them a chance to share it with others, which is a great way to continue optimizing you and your company’s name. Using a headline of “Presentation name by Author name” helps to increase your SEO effectiveness.
- Online Videos
Although not much different from seminar speech uploads, video uploads can highlight a variety of life presentations and increase your online exposure, especially if you use targeted headlines, specific keywords and title tags. If someone is searching for more information about you and can find an online video presentation on familiar websites such as Youtube or Vimeo, this could go a long way towards enhancing your reputation to the searcher.
- Social Networking
Social networking is one of the fastest and easiest ways to generate a lot of personal content, in both the good and bad ways, depending on how you control and monitor them. As social networking sites tend to be ranked high on search engines; thus, professional and consistent profiles on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc will definitely help to spread out your online brand performance effectively. The more exposure you have, the quicker your personal brand will become a major hit on all key search engine ranking pages and lift your profit margin to new heights.
In order to success in your personal branding strategy, it requires a consistent brand image on various online platforms with a professional and trusted web presence. On-site SEO and social activities are keys to promote your personal brand to wider public. However, more importantly, defining your target audience and goal clearly from the beginning will direct your online branding strategy more relevant and effective. Last but not lease, you should remember that the ultimate purpose of online activities is to support your true life, thus, make your online information real and trustworthy so that your personal true life, when needed, can totally back up your online brand.
