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One of the major issues at the social media panel I was a speaker of has been online reputation management. While I prefer the more proactive ways of reputation building instead of the emergency like reputation crisis management nonetheless most of the businesses not familiar with blogging and social media need basic advice on how to deal with bad press online.

So I decided to collect 8 very simple steps of emergency reputation management. These measures should help in cases where a forum or blog post shows up in the Google top 10 for your product or brand.

Most importantly before we start thinking about fending off a reputation issue we have to agree that we do not want to sweep things under the rug. Many people mistake reputation management for just that. Reputation management is about dealing with negative issues, facing not ignoring them.

1. Discover negative publicity early via simple tools like Google Alerts or Technorati Watchlist.
2. Reply as a representative of your company. Example: “I work at x and we have lots of clients using y with good results.” Do not make these clients up of course.
3. Show that you care. Example: “We have contacted our local dealer to deal with your problems, he should call you shortly.” Contact your local retailer to just do that.
4. Be matter of fact. Example: “This seems to be a serious issue you have. We will do everything to ensure your and other clients satisfaction. Please give us some time to deal with it internally.” Then be quick to deal with it.
5. Offer a refund if the client is too disgruntled already.
6. Offer the publisher a way to test the product or a new version of it if he hasn’t before or the last version failed.
7. Link to other clients or positive cases studies, even within your reply.
8. Contact the publisher directly to research and sort out the issue, do not rely solely on the published part.

While employing these simple measures always remember that you need to address the real underlying issue. Inherently flawed products or services will make others vent their frustration too so make sure you tackle larger issues not one by one but systematically even by discontinuing a product.

Also do not call your lawyers unless this is a evident case of slander. Silencing legitimate bloggers and consumer advocates will backfire manifold. You might end up with lots of negative publicity.

This Tuesday I spoke at the social media panel of SES Hamburg. While I enjoyed the great session for some people in the audience social media and blogs are not as enjoyable. The contrary seems to be the case. The last question asked at the end of the panel was the most striking. A man in a suit asked:

Can I outsource all that social media marketing crap to affiliates?

He really said “crap” and he was not really fond of the idea of having to deal with social media. While I see these websites and ways of publishing as new opportunities obviously others don’t. So let’s take a look at the outsourcing issue. We, all three of the speakers, were quick to warn of the dangers of outsourcing social media marketing to affiliates. Why?

• Affiliates do not care for your reputation, they aim at quick profits
• Affiliates often already fail in ethical SEO, in social media the standards of ethics are even higher
• Affiliates might break local laws in your name and at least in Germany you can be sued for that as well

So the idea of making affiliates your representatives on social media is inherently a bad one. The outsourcing idea by itself is not though! Indeed many people outsource their social media activities to marketing companies specialized in

• dealing with social media in a responsible manner
• creating outstanding content for social media, sometimes referred to as link bait
• offering business blogging consulting

One of my examples on the panel was in fact a blog I manage and write for in the name of a big German client, a shopping search engine. While some other shopping search engines have their blog-like news sites that even get tolerated on social media, my client’s blog really got accepted as a real genuine blog and even got linked by “real bloggers” in their blogrolls. This blog managed several times to get to the front page of the German Digg equivalent so it’s more than accepted, it’s a real blog itself by now.

So can you successfully outsource your social media marketing activities?

Yes you can! If you think it’s crap, I’ll advise you to change your mindset first though.

What are the most important benefits of serious social media engagement?

• Joining the conversation, you talk with the people instead of people just talking about you
• Reputation management and building, people get to know you and your brand, they remember you in a positive light
• Link building, if you offer value people will naturally link to you

Stop ignoring social media and blogging. If you can’t manage it yourself find a pro. You’ll find plenty of them in social media or via their own blogs.

Recently Ciaran Norris wrote a thorough piece on how the Guardian basically denounces SEO as scams and fails to grasp the whole concept of it, while facing the Google monopoly with all it’s ramifications. I took a closer look just to discover what the problem with search engine optimisation and the Guardian is: According to an article published at their own website the Guardian is not the leading UK online newspaper anymore. The Telegraph has outpaced them due to “hard technical work, SEO and increasing editorial content by as much as 50%”. As we know in the SEO industry content is still king and combined with proper SEO it can make a difference. So no wonder that the Telegraph managed to increase it’s traffic by 153.4%.

“To me it shows that some people high up in the publishing hierarchy are still stuck in the past, have a superficial expertise if at all in online publishing and blame a whole industry for their own failure.”

The folks at the Guardian better face reality and hire a solid SEO company. Newspapers are not bought solely on newstands anymore they are found via Google and read online for years now. If the Guardian is too slow to adapt they must face the responsibility themselves and stop badmouthing the SEO industry for their own lack of understanding of the new media environment.

It seems that most other established UK newspapers by now have grasped the concept of SEO with the exception of the Guardian. I already cited the The Times article predicting a huge SEO boom in the near future. The Independent has covered SEO only in a single a paragraph last year but the article was a sound one. Indeed The Guardian itself published a primer on SEO, as Ciaran correctly notices, and it was not only about scams. So it seems that it’s not The Guardian as whole but just an incompetent individual.

It’s a strange coincidence though that the publication of the outstanding SEO results of The Telegraph is followed by the denouncement of “SEO scams” by the Guardian a few days later.

As a German SEO Consultant I worked with UK and US SEO companies and other clients on many internationalisation or localisation projects in recent months. The international sites we tried to optimise in many cases failed to compete with even much smaller local competitors. Also the SEO measures undertaken were far from sufficient due to structural limitations of these projects.

Thus I want to introduce 10 most common fatal localization mistakes English language sites face when entering other markets.

1. No local domain, instead using internationalcompany.com and having no local domain like .fr for France, .de for Germany or .pl for Poland. Thus everybody will link to the .com domain and the non-English speaking audience will bounce off it before finding the small flag in the right top corner. In the meantime a domain grabber will make big bucks off your brand.
2. Translating before doing local market research. Ever tried selling beef in India? Or freedom fries in France? Not all mistakes are that easy to spot. Nonetheless most companies just translate their sites without even taking a look at what a new market demands.
3. No local server. You need a German server to rank high in Google for Germany. The difference is substantial.
4. Translation full of grammatical and spelling errors. I’m astounded how many business sites fail at that and how bad. Nobody will trust you if you can’t even spell correctly trying to sell something. Hire a translator who is a native speaker of the language you want to localize to and actually lives there not someone living next door.
5. Setting up a completely new domain for a new country days before you enter the market. Basically you should register the most common international domains months or years before you enter the markets. It might be gone already later and you risk ending up in the Google sand box not being acknowledged as an authority and thus not ranking.
6. Being far too late on the market. I’m still amazed by the companies which need months or years to offer a product or service in Germany fisrt offered in the US. Why give away 100 million German speaking potential customers to copycats and local businesses? Coming too late (like Facebook in Germany or eBay in Poland) means you will probably never be the leader on the market.
7. Not having a local address or representation. With the rise of local search and a plethora of local websites and services that replaced directories you won’t even get a link without a proper address.
8. Not offering payment via PayPal or other locally accepted or wide spread payment methods. Unlike in the US e.g people in Germany don’t use credit cards much.
9. Broken character sets: Recently I joined several ad networks and affiliate networks and those sites which were translated had in many cases broken German “Umlauts”. In most cases I will leave such a site.
10. No local blog. If you do not have a “company interface” in a local language you won’t reach the public. You rely solely on search engine traffic but you won’t get it for the reasons above for a while. No useful localized content means no local links. Without local links you won’t rank, even as an authority domain.

Are there more issues? Yes there are, but most sites fail to implement these localization basics. On the other hand: These 10 fatal mistakes are easily avoidable.

Do you use Google Analytics? Well, a recent study shows that you’re not alone, roughly one third of the Alexa top 500 websites traffic wise use it. That surprised me a little. Anyways, I use Google Analytics myself and noticed before that some numbers are inaccurate or downright wrong. In May I discovered how wrong, completely wrong.

The numbers of search engine referers, more specifically, are wrong. I’ve noticed that before but wasn’t panicking as no statistic tool is perfectly accurate, you always should use at least 2 of them and compare the numbers. Now this time I checked my stats over at SEO 2.0 I was unable to ignore it anymore.

SEO 2.0 is mostly about social media and blogging SEO and it relies on traffic from other sources than Google. I only get insignificant numbers of visitors from Google on my blog, mostly due to very specific “long tail” queries. The only really important keyphrase is “SEO 2.0″ itself. Now looking at my May stats I was very surprised that one of better performing keywords was “site seo vs blog seo” without quotes.

I looked deeper into that just to discover that all 60 visitors looking for this keyword is one person from Bucharest, Romania. Google Analytics counted her or him several times a day for more than 2 weeks.

Now I sometimes create returning visits just by launching my FireFox with my saved tabs but how can a person search for the same query every day several times and then click the search result each time? This one riddles me. I’ve seen that kind of behaviour with Google Analytics in the past but always thought it was due to myself or several developers from my client working on the same site.

Not this time, there is certainly no Romanian developer working on my site. Now try to multiply these numbers for one of the top 500 sites and you end up with completely worthless statistics.

I’m not here to bash Google for their great analytics solution. I love checking and comparing bounce rates etc. but it’s more than strange that a search engine gets the search referers wrong in its own analytics solution. So if they don’t want people to make up conspiracy theories about Google overstating their search referers numbers they better fix this quick.

What can you do about it? Look out for some alternatives and either use Google Analytics and at least another solution or even more. What alternatives are there?

Well, if you’re running a “top 500 website” you better rely on a solution used and recommended by leading search marketers. This is ClickTracks in most cases. Also Omniture has been recommended by many professionals. Many people outside of Germany probably don’t know it but some German marketers prefer Etracker. Just to name three of them. There are plenty of high end solutions out there you surely can afford if you run such a huge site.

For the average webmaster seeking a low cost or free solution there is no single alternative to rely on. There is Piwik, an open source alternative recently hailed by many, but it’s in alpha now and didn’t work for me, it produced SQL errors instead.

Another solution is to use Google Analytics along a specialized search analytics tool like:

• Hittail
• 103bees
• Enquisite

Have you experienced similar issues with Google Analytics or am I the only one to discover this?

There have been a post at SEOmoz, by SEO theory blogger Micheal Martinez already in 2006 and a post in 2007 from AimClear focused on the reliability on Google Analytics with another topic, outages.

My conclusion right now is a grim one: Google Analytics is cheating you, I hope not on purpose. Unless you do not care about accurate search referers and visitor numbers you should use one of the solutions above or resort to log file analysis.

Do you still build links? Well, I don’t do link building anymore, I get links. People link to my SEO blog voluntarily, not just any people but respected bloggers and search marketing mavens.

At the same time I notice that people in the search marketing industry are still cautious when it comes to blogging. They either do not see the ROI in it or they fail to explain the return on investment to their clients. They still rather prefer to sell old school link building instead of setting up a blog for a client company. Marketers still do not make the connection between earning money and the writing for a blog because it does not drive direct sales in most cases.

Now the simplest way to explain the ROI of blogging for a SEO or a SEO client is to take a look at the backlinks:

• How many are they,
• who linked
• and how?

How does my blog perform in contrast to my website?

Not only my blog has been linked by the really respected figures and sites in the SEO industry:

• Search Engine Land,
• Search Engine Watch,
• Search Engine Roundtable,
• TopRank Online Marketing Blog,
• SEO by the SEA

to name just a few, dozens of other great bloggers have linked to me, my blog posts have been submitted by numerous individuals on many social sites etc.

• Did I actively engage in link exchange with these people?
• Did I actively submit my site?
• Did I have to actually build links?

No I didn’t.

I got the links. I got those links because I participated in “the conversation” on social media. I got them because I had an interface between me and the outside world, my blog. People won’t link as eagerly to a website which is simply selling something, be it SEO services or car parts. So I challenge you: Set up a static site and a blog at the same time and do link building for the site while you create content and join the conversation for the blog. Now track the time you use for both and compare the results. Also do not forget to look at your link structure: How natural do these links appear to Google?

Of course blogging and social media is far more than just getting links but if you need to explain the ROI of it in SEO terms use the backlinks to justify the effort. This is both the simplest ROI of blogging as well as the simplest way to explain it.

To read more on blogging ROI check out this list.

Along with the “no future” fable in recent days we have seen another talk of the town or rather the global village: Spreading false information as SEO tactic of link baiting. Now I’m really glad! Finally Google will ban Jason Calacanis for spreading false information about SEO (”SEO is bullshit”) and his web directory Mahalo. Now let me explain the situation.

Matt Cutts in a discussion made clear that using such methods is fraudulent and can lead to a penalty by Google. Why did he say that in the first place? A hugely popular made up link bait article was disclosed as a hoax by the author of it, Lyndon Antcliff of Cornwall SEO. It was too late for Fox News and other news outlets on the British Aisles though, they reported the story as true without checking the facts or sources.

The implications of spreading hoaxes via the press is not my main focus here. It’s really a sign of low quality of major news outlets. That said let’s take a look at the Jason Calacanis case which is very similar to the undisclosed satire piece at Money.co.uk: He repeatedly stated that “SEO is bullshit”. Also he used at least one other version of this statement by saying “affiliate marketing is bullshit”. His “argument” was debunked dozens of times already so I won’t add another one of these SEO primers. I want to stress the undisclosed satire aspect of this infamous link bait.

Mr. Calacanis also is the man behind Mahalo. What is Mahalo according to it’s own definition?

“What is Mahalo? Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine”

When you take a closer look at the “engine” you quickly realize that it’s a not a revolutionary Web 3.0 concept it’s sold as but basically a web directory like any web directory we know since the early nineties. There are no robots or spiders and the algorithm seems to be rather a simple CMS that allows to publish a few thousands of pages.

Now is Mahalo a human-powered search engine? No, it’s not, it’s clearly a static website provided by editors (aka guides) and augmented with some user input. I’m sure the new, yet to be established Ministry of Truth, led by Mr. Cutts, truth expert of Google will quickly find out about that and ban Mahalo.

Also it is obvious that SEO is no “bullshit”. I even did some research on agriculture in this context. Livestock breeding experts agree that bullshit at least stinks. Now as SEO is purely virtual and limited to the Internet it can’t stink, so it can’t be bullshit either. Unfortunately this link bait tactic based on this false information has already spread and other people are using it. Now as Matt Cutts truthfully has spoken out about this problem I’m sure they all get banned. I’m glad. Please Google, ban them all. We really need a Ministry of Truth.

In recent weeks someone reading about SEO probably had the impression it has something to do with punk music. All the talk about “no future” and “SEOs not dead” everywhere. Also if you look for “no future” in Google you will find “SEO has no future” right in the top 5 just behind the Sex Pistols. If there was a band called SEO pistols it would be the time when it’s front member has been declared dead.

The original Sex Pistols reunited in recent years and punk is still around like rock or pop. Now I won’t stretch this allegory too much. While the original post that started all this craze is nothing more than a short rant of somebody who is not even an expert on SEO as he himself states I was nevertheless amazed by the sheer number, length and fervor of the replies he got. I just want to let the numbers speak for themselves, as I miss them in this debate. At the same time that the “SEO has no future” has been proclaimed, in fact three days earlier, an article in the Times was published that described what’s really going on in the market. May I cite the most important part of it:

[Forrester Research] forecasts that spending on pay per click in America will increase between 2007 and 2012 by 125% to $10.1 billion (£5.1 billion), compared with SEO soaring 365% to $8.9 billion.

So next time someone tells you SEO has no future, instead of explaining in a huge post why not just point at the numbers.

Search engine optimisers are often treated like the plumbers of the web. In many cases they have to clean up the mess architects and construction workers left. Also they get treated as if they do some kind of dirty work. The ensuing reputation problem comes along with a low self esteem of many in the SEO industry. Now the newly revived concept of findability can make this problem a woe of the past.

What is is findability? To be honest the current concept of findability proposed by the author of the book “Building Findable Websites” resembles simply on-page or on-site SEO best practices. There are some added novelties like Microformats which haven’t been widely adopted by the SEO industry yet. All in all findability is about website optimisation for searchers and users alike, or in other words making a website work both in search as well as from the user standpoint who already is a visitor. While there are also references to off-page factors the focus is clearly the “building” of “findable websites” like the title of the book already suggests.

There are a few great introductions into the findability concept so I won’t add another one. I want to make you aware what findability means for the SEO industry and/or community:

1. Findability, usability and accessibility are interconnected along with other facets of information architecture
2. Findability is marketed as the last missing ingredient in website design and development, it’s not as seemingly detached discipline like SEO might appear
3. There is no black hat findability
4. There is no findability reputation problem
5. The concept of findability allows others, non-SEO people, to do the groundwork

So basically the people who often for years ignored or frowned upon SEO finally will realise that they were wrong: The information architects, web designers and developers as well as the copy writers or other content creators. Findability is all about making these people do their jobs properly. Now will this make SEO specialists unemployed? It won’t. It just means the we can finally let others do the dirty work or simply groundwork as I do not really assume that SEO is dirty work. People out there do though.

SEO is a dirty word. Findability isn’t. It’s nice and clean. So offer findability along with usability and accessibility, formerly known as SEO services. This way you also don’t have to explain the acronym S.E.O over and over again as findability is a simple English term everybody has some basic understanding of just based on the well known verb to find.

So how will SEO experts survive this? SEO long ago ceased to be about making websites findable. It’s much more than that by now. SEO by now is the work of translating websites into profits, whatever it takes, be it findability, SMO or viral marketing. The SEO industry is the fastest evolving online industry. I don’t want to deal with h1 tags and image based menus. The basics must be implemented by those who are originally responsible for them, I want to do the really cool work, the link baiting, the viral videos, the blogging. Reclaim true SEO!