from MediaPost Search Insider

Flatter and more-responsive organizations. Working on SEO is like taking your Web site to the doctor: a good SEO consultant will tell you what you have to do, but the hard work is up to you. Companies that listen and respond will do better than companies that justify, finger-point and go on the defensive. Healthy companies look for ways to improve; dysfunctional companies offer reasons why improvement is impossible. Companies that refuse to do the heavy lifting required to whip their site into shape generally are equally negligent in other areas of their business.

Better communication channels. SEO is by nature a cross-functional exercise. It involves many different departments, all working together toward a common goal. This approach is well within the comfort zone of healthy organizations, but totally foreign to dysfunctional ones. An SEO initiative severely tests the communication and cooperative capabilities of an organization. It requires marketing, IT, product managers and often legal to all work together, and the faster they can do this, the more positive the results will be. SEO is not a one-shot tactic. In the most competitive categories, it’s a full-out and ongoing war. The companies that can respond and adapt quickly will win that war. The ones mired in bureaucracy and butt-covering will inevitably sink in the rankings.

Healthy community connections. The new era of digital communications requires companies to be engaged in an ongoing dialogue with their community of customers. Great companies do this instinctively. Bad companies put up huge corporate communication barricades, keeping the angry hordes at bay. Because much of this dialogue happens online, these dialogues tend to generate reams of content and links. Raving customers generate link love; angry customers generate link hate and reputation management problems. A company that can effectively engage in conversations with customers will find a natural lift in organic rankings is often the result.

Efficient execution habits. Companies that keep a clean house do better organically than companies that keep skeletons in the closet. Both approaches are symptomatic of the company’s overall approach to business. Highly effective companies constantly upgrade systems and infrastructure, both in their organizations and their online presence. They invest in best of breed tools and technology. And they are able to quickly prioritize and executive as the landscape shifts. Again, a clean technical online infrastructure makes SEO much, much easier.

Executives that “get it.” C-level executives who make SEO a priority realize that the marketing landscape is shifting quickly. They’ve been paying attention to customer behavioral trends and have committed to being proactive rather than reactive. This usually indicates well-placed intelligence gathering “antennae” and feedback loops. It also indicates an executive who isn’t hopelessly mired in “old-boy” thinking and outdated command and control management models.

Corporate pride. Content might not be the sole king anymore (SEO is more of an oligarchy now) but it’s still part of the ruling class. Great cultures tend to engender pride that naturally precipitates an explosion of content. People blog about where they work, people tweet and product managers enthuse verbosely about what they’re working on. All of this generates great, searchable content online.

Companies get the SEO rankings they deserve. I’m guessing that if you asked any SEO consultant in the world, they’ll tell you their favorite clients are the ones that are the easiest to work with: clients who listen, are proactive and for whom continual improvement is a religion. Based on what I’ve seen in the past decade, this attitude extends beyond the SEO team (indeed, it has to) and permeates the entire culture. There are those who game the system and gain undeserved rankings, but more and more, “organic” rankings are just that: rankings that come from the very nature of the company and how they conduct themselves in the marketplace.

I came across an interesting way Yahoo pulls results that doesn’t seem to be accurate. The company I’m currently working with, Sona MedSpa, which offers laser hair removal, botox treatments and body contouring had some necessary cleanup issues I was faced with. Before I begin, notice the services Sona offers.

After doing a few searches, I found the below description shows up for the brand, sona medspa.

Ok, does that seem to match Sona’s services? They do have a center in Dallas but sure don’t offer Hair Cuts!!. I did some investigation and read up on how yahoo pulls search results. There was an area in their FAQ’s that stated many of the results are pulled from The Open Directory and the Yahoo Directory . I did searches and they didn’t show up which continued the confusion.

Yahoo suggested adding these two tags to prevent pulling from those sources.

<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP">
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

After a few days, nothing again.  Now I know it takes weeks for a page to be spidered but I was ancy so I contacted Yahoo to see if this was a potential fix. I got a response back from a guy/girl named “Sky”, (yes, I laughed too!) that stated the info was being pulled from Idearc.com which is the parent company of YellowPages.com. Sky suggested I contact YellowPages to updated the listing.I then did a search there and nothing came up again.

Frustration insued and I contacted “Sky” again to inquire why Yahoo pulls results rather than spider and index the page directly. I got an email back this morning stating that an engineer researched the case further and determined the below response:

Hello Dan,

Thanks for writing to the Yahoo! Search and Directory Support.

I apologize for the delay. Our engineers have investigated this matter and we’re getting this information from a company called PositionTech which works together with Idearc. According to our engineers, Idearc needs to contact PositionTech to have this information corrected. The feed in question is called “Idearc_Local_Aggregate__Feed”. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you again for writing to the Yahoo! Search and Directory Support.

Regards,

Sky

Search & Directory Support

Yahoo! Inc

Ok, so I found that PositionTech.com is a search marketing firm that works with YellowPages. Again I thought about it and realized why would Yahoo be doing this. I emailed sky back to have it corrected and again asked why Yahoo woukld be doing this rather than going to the site directly. I’m stil waiting on a response but this situation reconfirms my distaste for Yahoo and their practices. I plan on following up as soon as “Sky” looks int the matter.

SEO is synonymous with ranking on the first SERP page in Google. Optimizing a site for Google means getting links, many links, no matter what. Defining and redefining SEO will not change the way these people perceive it. This is not an article for them. Those webmasters who optimize solely for Google are basically targeting only 70% of the search engine market, and disregarding the rest.

This is for those who have heard of social networking but don’t exactly know how it applies to SEO and want to use all possible SEO channels to drive more traffic and to gain more customers. This article will prove what “real” SEO value is to be expected from services like Twitter.

Does twitter Pass Any Link Juice?

Since Twitter started gaining popularity the question about its “SEO value” has been on the minds of many webmasters who obviously want to boost their placement into Google’s SERPs. But using Twitter for “link juice” is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology.

Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo!, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with Google’s “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. This example alone shows that Google’s algorithms are not the gospel for all search engines.

According to compete.com, Ask.com owns about 2.5% of the search engine market share. The same source shows that in November 2008 there were 255 million search queries on Ask.com. This is nothing compared to 7235 millions on Google, but can you seriously disregard a source of such traffic? Ask.com is a potential gate for visitors that could convert into customers.

So let’s ask the question again, shall we? Does Twitter pass any link juice? For Ask.com it does.

Do tinyURL Shortened URLs Have SEO Value?

The short answer is yes. TinyURLs are dynamically created URLs that redirect users to the real URL via 301 (permanent redirect). Search engines do not index TinyURLs, but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead. The problem with Twitter, as we already discussed, is the “nofollow” attribute added to all submitted links.

Are There Any Other Possible SEO Advantages with Twitter?

As I already said, SEO is not only about building links. Optimizing a site is about creating and promoting content that can be regarded as a resource. “Creating” is “onsite SEO.” “Promoting” is “offsite SEO.”

Every time you submit your site to a directory you “promote it” – meaning that you do “offsite SEO.” Every time a link to your site is published somewhere on the web a gate to your site is being opened. People don’t care about “nofollow” attributes. If they see a link and they think the content it leads to is interesting, they follow.

When visitors land on a page from an exterior link some other metrics are affected: number of unique visitors, number of page views, and time on site. These metrics matter for the search engines more and more; since all other variables are so easily gamed (links and keywords are all subject to spam and black hat SEO strategies).

To make a long story short: although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value. For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss.

Reputation is everything in the business world and is important to maintain. With the huge growth in people becoming antiquated with the internet and the freedom to voice their opinion, it’s important for businesses to keep their employees and customers happy.

One problem many organizations face is a former employee  who was let go for no reason or maybe not given the raise they deserve. After this happens, a sour taste towards the company is left in their mouths and they begin a smear campaign. This goes with customers as well. They experienced a problem with a product they purchased and the customer service rep could get it right for the 5th time.

Especially with the popularity of blogs, the amateurs are in full force voicing their opinion to warn others of the offending company.

Enter the SEO expert, focused on obtaining organic prominence as quickly as possible. The objective is to push the bad content as far down the SERPs as possible and, if necessary, debunk the credibility of the afflicting editorial.

Ironically the tactics we reach for in are strikingly similar to any normal SEO campaign. Competitive intelligence, content publishing, link building, taking inventory of digital assets for universal search and leveraged power of social channels are among classic tools of the trade. What differentiates crises management is the sense of urgency, pressure to perform, legal options and the obvious downside to failure. Here are 8  tips for SEO Reputation Management Success:

1. Evaluate the authority of the page on which the negative content is published. As with any SEO assignment, start by taking a look at PageRank and inbound links profile using Yahoo Site Explorer and other tools. If the offending result is not on a site’s homepage, then take a careful look at older and similar interior pages along with their archives. Google’s algorithmic regard for any page tends to accumulate over time as a result of numerous factors, known and “black box.” Therefore it’s a good idea to keep in mind that any page’s clout might increase over time. Be advised and plan accordingly. Reciprocally if the problem content is currently indexing on a blog’s homepage, the difficulty may be mitigated when the post cycles off the homepage into archives. While the post is on the homepage, its content has the full “weight” of the homepage’s authority.This won’t be the case in archive unless the post generates great links. That said many blogs’ category pages, author and date archives accumulate PageRank and you might have to wait a while for the post to cycle even deeper into to site over time. (Note: PageRank isn’t everything but it’s better to have it than not.)
2. Since some offending results violate copyright or trademark laws, a strong understanding of and willingness to utilize legal channels can be important in the SEO’s defense . Sometimes the first attempt is from our client’s law firm in the form of a cease and desist letter. Be aware of laws as pertain to protected marks and intellectual property. Certainly taking the legal route can yield results and sometimes the expense makes sense. Our legal team has scared many an idiot off our client’s back. Some rouges just don’t want to mess with lawyers and can be “encouraged” to take down their problem content.On the other hand be a realist. Some insolent jerk halfway around the world won’t give a rat’s ass about your attorney’s saber rattling. Sometimes firing legal missals can even result in your opponent digging in their heals with an intransigent disregard for reality.When nasty search engine results stem from social media channels, it can be impossible to locate the villain let alone engage them legally. Social site moderators often couldn’t care less because they thrive on the passionate engagement which surrounds controversy. StumbleUpon (eBay) is the worst as they are nearly completely unwilling to enforce Terms of Services as pertain to abusive “troll” users.
3. Determine the likelihood that the substance of proposed defensive content will further provoke and backfire virally. We find it’s best if newly created content and subsequent promotional activity do not appear to be directly related to the problem we’re competing with. “Instead, create defensive content that builds on strengths of your business to contradict the negatives raised by a bad editorial. Build your content to outrank the offending material.Though we never take directly refuting offensive results off the table fully, one needs to be extremely careful. We don’t want 5 other bloggers to rally behind their friend and take up a damaging cause they hadn’t even noticed before.
4. Unless you’re an expert, talk to a professional before engaging directly in social channels surrounding the problem results.  There are very few instances when taking a step back and counting to 10 will negatively impact the end result of defensive activities. If you’re not a regular contributor in a specific social media channel, learning the vernacular while under duress is not the best choice.
5. If direct engagement in social channels makes sense, attempt to earn the provocateurs respect by your response. Every disaster is an opportunity in the making and vice versa.
6. Take the high road over and over. Then take the high road again. If that doesn’t work…you can always nuke em’. There are white hat methods and other, ummmm, not-white hat methods available to “eliminate” the problem. Given recent furor over public discussion of non-basic SEO tactics you’ll have to contact me directly to discuss the options further.
7. Consider paid search as a stopgap and/or ongoing strategy. When weighing the cost of PPC to circumvent damaging organic results, paid search is often an attractive “lesser of all evils’ option, especially in the short term while waiting for other solutions to come online. Google’s content network, in the hands of a site-targeting expert, can be a highly effective channel-especially when clarifying or refuting mainstream damage in news, niche’ and social channels.
8. Get back to SEO basics. The best defense is a good offense.  It didn’t make sense at first because the offensive result was on a PR zero site with little authority.

With the rampant proliferation of user-generated content, the opportunity for disgruntled malcontents to damage your firm’s reputation increases everyday. Make sure to evaluate the extent of the problem, consider legal options, and stay within your comfort zone. Take the high road whenever possible, treat your opponent with respect and consider paid search as a stopgap or ongoing prophylactic measure.

Above all, remember that when talking about reputation management in the organic SERPs, you’re talking on-demand SEO. The best defense is a robust offense so make sure the strength of your site’s optimization makes it harder for anyone to even get on the SERPs for direct brand search. Finally, don’t make things worse by biting off more than you can chew. Engage an expert instead.