Maintaining your online reputation is a tricky exercise, one demanding equal parts diligence and creativity. In a day when Google is apt to rank the latest news relating to your site on the first page, irrespective of whether it is representative of your business, you have to be able to not only know about these attacks, but be able to react to them.

There are steps you can take on a daily basis to mitigate the effects of these events, and we’ve complied a handy list you can use every day to help manage your online reputation!

6 Tips to enhance your online reputation on a daily basis!

1. Monitor your online presence – The first order of the day is to be cognizant of what is being said about you and your brand. To attempt to handle this on your own without using many of the handy tools created for this purpose is madness. Employ tools like Google Alerts, Mention, and Topsy, among others.
2. Ask for customer reviews – Your customers are your best source for positive reviews and endorsements. Don’t be shy about asking and rewarding them for these! This can usually help push any negatives further down the search results pages, where it’s unlikely they’ll be seen.
3. Try to be pleasant! – Even if it goes against every grain of your being, being pleasant to your customers, even the ornery ones, is a sure-fire way to grow more of said customers!
4. Check the Google search results – Doing regular searches in Google search and in Google Images will help you locate any less than positive mentions of your brand quickly.
5. Add to the positives content about your brand – Be sure to move the meter in your direction by contributing positive content about your brand anywhere you can, the more authoritative the better!
6. Reward positive mentions with links – This can serve several purposes. It not only puts the focus on your content, but in addition gives links to authority and relevance, rewarding them in the process.

Maintaining an awesome online reputation is a bit of work, but is totally necessary in an environment where we can be trashed quite in minutes!

Utilizing local SEO to rank your sites in 2014 is more defined than in the past. There are a variety of best practices you should use that will certainly help you in the local search results, and with surprising speed. Let’s look at a few of these techniques that will turn up the volume on your search results.

How to do local SEO for 2014

• Optimized Google+ Local page – This is a must-do. Not only will it help you rank highly for this specific location, your pages will be indexed nearly immediately, and Google features these search listings, especially on mobile.
• Make sure that citations, NAP listings and on-page address data are accurate – NAP (name, address, phone number) citations are a major ranking signal for local SEO, and work much the same way that backlinks do for a non-local site. Make sure you have consistent information across all of these platforms.
• Optimize local pages for local keywords – This can be something of an art to weave in location geo-modifiers into your copy and make it sound human. The payoff is worth it however. Be sure that your primary page keyword, brand name and location is in the title tag, the first third of the page, and the description tag.
• Business directory listings – Make it a point and claim your listings in any local directories. These will turn out to be the easiest citations you’ll acquire, and will also be of great benefit in terms of SEO, search rankings and traffic.
• Get awesome reviews and testimonials – Be sure you encourage your customers to leave reviews for you on your Google+ Place page, or third party review sites like Yelp. Make it easy for them to do so by providing links on your pages. And don’t ever write fake reviews, or buy the same for your own site! The sites are very good now at discovering phony reviews, and it won’t be good.

The good news is that Local SEO in 2014 can be performed with little fuss, just a bit of work!

How to Think About Links in 2014

While plenty of people in the post-Penguin Google reality would have you believe that link building as a form of helping you rank better in the search engines is dead, we beg to differ.

Not so fast, as stated by Google’s own Liege of link building Matt Cutts states: “Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover (how relevant or important somebody is) and maybe, over time, social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

Now that we have that cleared up, let’s look at some of the best practices for link building in 2014 and likely beyond.

Internal linking on your site – Internal linking means the links you have on your own pages that (hopefully) lad to more relevant content on your site. Google views this as a help to your visitors, and as long as you don’t overuse the linkage with tons of excess keyword links, such as extra menus and tag clouds and stuff like that, you’ll have some love too. Link from textual content to other textual content, and use anchor text that is prudent.

Google+ shares – It may not be Facebook yet, but Google+ can get your pages indexed rapidly, and this definitely benefits you in your search rankings.

Guest blogging – Having your posts featured on popular blogs has long been a way to garner links, but have you considered being the blog that accepts the guest posts? This can also help collect links, in addition to helping you build authority and content.

Curate popular content on your own site – Every now and then we find a post or piece of content that has gone viral in our market and is of interest to your readers too. Curate this onto your own blog, giving attribution of course, and encourage your own readers to share it with their social circles, thus sending them to your pages!

Relevance and diversity – Google is all about relevance now, and so the days of getting a ton of links irrelevant to your niche and having that actually work are over. Obtain relevant links, and make sure to vary the anchor text coming into your site, if you’ve got any control over it.

Social Media Marketing

Find Quick Results Using Social Media Ads

Love the concept of using social media to reach a huge pool of people, but are unsure how you can make this happen? While setting up a social media presence that is vibrant and popular can take some time and effort, reaching a multitude of highly targeted people on social media can be done using paid advertising on these networks.

Where you might struggle along for months attempting to create or find an audience, you can get one in minutes from the likes of Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter, and to a smaller degree, Tumblr, Vine, Pinterest and YouTube. They all have a unique following, and it’s better to plan your ads in conjunction with your target demographics.

What are the benefits of using paid social ads?

There are several benefits to using social media advertising. Let’s examine just a few of them.

• Incredible targeting tools – It’s a piece of cake to target unbelievably small segments of your audience using highly relevant ads.
• Immense audiences – Your message in front of millions of people extremely fast.
• Opportunities for cheap ads – In contrast to Google Adwords, social media ad platforms are typically far less expensive.
• Fast results – Your ads can be up in minutes. Setup and approval times are short.

Suggestions for maximizing performance with paid social ads

• Test relentlessly – This will help improve CTR as well as lower costs. Test images, colors, copy punctuation: it all matters! A single percent improvement in performance can be the difference between success and failure!
• Target carefully – The beauty of social ads is the ability to target minutely. Don’t waste it! Get granular with your targeting.
• Tie in a sound content marketing strategy with your social ads – Having great content to not only present but follow us is a must if you don’t want to pay for followers that rapidly abandon you for greener pastures.
• Tracking is vital! – The majority of these platforms incorporate some sort of tracking for you, but make sure you use the best solution you’re able to, and it may differ for various platforms.
• Try retargeting – Simply put, retargeting works. It may look a little creepy to have your ads stalking customers across the Web, but numbers don’t lie.

Cheap ads, immense reach and easy implementation. What’s not to like?

How to increase the chances of your content getting shared

Social sharing is a great way to ensure that your content has exposure to audiences you may not have had access to, and can build your business far faster than ever before. What’s more, it’s quite simple to set up and implement!

A few amazing reasons why you want your content shared!

To illustrate just how social media enmeshed we all are in social media, studies show that Americans are spending an average of 37 minutes a day on their various social media accounts, even more than their email! And, it looks like about 60 percent of us are doing that from our mobile device of choice.

With so many making purchasing choices based upon recommendations from friends and review sites, having your content shared socially in a positive manner only adds to the appeal of your products and services.

And last but certainly not least, the incredible reach of social media will benefit your brand in ways you can’t possibly imagine.

4 Ways you can ramp up the social media sharing!

• Include social sharing capabilities in your content – If you don’t supply them with the ability to share it, they won’t! Make sure that you prominently display social sharing buttons on each piece of content you put out there, even emails, and make certain you use calls to action to tell them specifically what you’d like them to do! Incentivize if needed!
• Join relevant social media groups and get your brand known – There are many people in social groups on the major social media sites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and others. Search out these groups, join the ones you are able to, and begin to make friends. You’ll be surprised at the results before long!
• Keep it short – Kissmetrics reports those Facebook posts of less than 80 characters are engaged some 66 percent more than longer ones. Keep it brief, and be sure to include a call to action.
• Love those images and videos! – Everyone knows that images and videos are the most shared items on the web. Studies are now showing that posts with images or videos receive a whopping 40 percent more interaction than others that don’t have visuals.