Online personal branding and marketing helps not only your company search engine optimization, but also your own personal search engine optimization efforts. Whether you are trying to find a job or marketing your company, the bottom line is you should strive to build your name as a leader in your industry.

The following are some low cost personal online branding resources to consider:

1. LinkedIn – If you have a LinkedIn account but haven’t touched it in many years now might be the time to get in there and really beef it up. If you don’t have one make the effort and launch one. Make it nice and robust by filling it up with every bit of information you can that will directly reflect your business. Utilize keywords that people might be using in the search engines for things like titles and descriptions. This will give you an opportunity to start ranking in search results.

2. Facebook – A Facebook account is a must. They often times rank extremely well in search engines so make sure it is appropriate and relevant to your business. Fill in as many fields as you can in order to make it clear on what type of service it is that you offer. Understand that if you are using your Facebook account for personal purposes, try creating two different accounts, one for business and personal. And whatever you do, please be careful of the types of things you post to your account if you are only using one account…everyone can see it


3. Twitter – Twitter will be a great place to not only be visible but bring in some new possible business as well. Same principals apply, launch an account and fill it out completely and start following people that are following your competition. This will get you on the map in front of your audience and over time they will start following you as well.

4. Blog – Launch a blog and start writing about your industry and your area of expertise. Once you start writing you will then be able to leverage your blog posts through the social media channels list above. Over time you will build a loyal following of readers and eventually some of those readers could turn into clients.

5. Profile Image – Make sure to use the same profile image throughout all your profiles. This way you can brand yourself even more for when people bump into your other profiles. They will be able to make the connection almost immediately if you keep your image consistent. Your face will be the logo of your business with social media.

5. Profile Links – Make sure you consistently add your company website (or cross link your other social networking profiles) throughout all of your profiles. Also, some social networking sites allow links of your RSS feeds, please be sure to add this in as it will help generate more visitors to your blog and website overall.

6. Portfolio - Depending on what type of business you have you should keep some sort of portfolio to showcase your work for other potential clients to see.

These are just some of the things you can do to market yourself online and help your online personal brand. Most don’t even cost any money they just require time and patience.

An interesting survey by the Forrester Blog: Google, Yahoo! and Amazon are the most trusted brands online. I’m really not surprised by Google and Amazon, but I’d have thought that Yahoo! lost more ground. They were in second place in 2007 and still hold onto second in 2009 even though they’ve lost ground with consumers. Amazon gained and still is in third – barely.

If I were to hazard a prediction here, I’d say by the next survey, Amazon will hold second place behind Google and Facebook, Microsoft, and YouTube will all have gained higher recognition with at least one of them possibly passing Yahoo! I also think MySpace will fall off the list and be replaced, possibly by Twitter.

But here’s the question: What does it take to make the list in the first place? Trustworthiness, helpfulness, and relevance. So does that mean if you develop those three qualities for your website that you’ll stand a chance to be on the list in the next survey? Probably not. But I do think that if you gain a reputation for those three qualities within your niche then you could be one of the most trusted authorities within your niche and industry online. Don’t you think?

Having a trusted brand online goes way beyond a solid search engine optimization and pay per click advertising program, it means your company is truly a leader in your marketplace. For instance, I have a client that is a manufacturer of restaurant equipment. Yes, I have helped them achieve top search engine rankings, a robust pay per click advertising campaign in all three search networks and have even gotten them active in social media. What I have found is that everything performs very well for them online since they have been a true leader in their industry for over 40 years (well before the web existed!). So the point is it takes a good amount of work, energy and innovation that goes way beyond marketing efforts to become a top online brand in a given industry. Are you and your company up for the task?

It happens all the time in the bricks and mortar business world. A partnership goes wrong and one party heads off and starts up in competition. It can be a tough situation at any time but what happens when it’s an online business?

What if it’s your wife or husband? They know the inner working of your business and, more importantly, they know the inner workings of you – how you think, how you act and you react. They are in a perfect position to publish a wide range of negative reviews about your business and, unless you can prove it is them, there is little you can do to stop the situation.

It’s an interesting situation. In the offline world, you are real people with personalities, friends and loyal customers. In the offline world, your faceless, often with no persona to speak off. So how do you defend yourself and your business?

This situation is really no different to that of a disgruntled customer or ex-employee. You need to be ranking well in search results so that bad reviews find it difficult to outrank you. My first step would be to establish Google alerts that advised me every time my business or brand were mentioned.

How would you handle this situation?

Online reputation is more than monitoring to see who mentions your name. It’s really a combination of three things:

• Traditional marketing
• Public relations
• Search engine optimization

Where these three online disciplines intersect has come to be called reputation management. Let’s dissect what that means.

Here is a very helpful video that I found about online reputation management:

In a traditional marketing sense, reputation management involves the monitoring of your brand and the defense of it through advertising and customer relations. In other words, you are meeting the market in the public square. Your “best foot forward” is your reputation and how you manage that foot says a lot about what others will say about you or perceive you.

Public relations is the discipline of courting media to ensure that you have a positive public image. That takes some finesse since critics and reviewers could be saying some pretty negative things about you. Nevertheless, your public relations strategy is an integral part of your online reputation management.

Finally, search engine optimization – the practice of writing content so that it has an increased chance to rank well in the search engines.

Again, where these three disciplines meet is online reputation management. You can leave it to chance or pursue and aggressive strategy, but I prefer the latter.

I was asked the question, “Should I spend more time on SEO or reputation management? My response: Good SEO is reputation management.

Think about what the latter is. It’s using search engines, social media, and other online marketing tools to maintain a positive image of yourself and your business. If you do it right, you’ll build reputation management into everything you do. Search engine optimization included.

You can’t keep thinking either/or when you live in a both/and world. You will eventually come across a former employee or customer who had a bad enough experience that they want to tell the world about it. If you SEO your website and blog properly then you’ll make it more difficult for them to gain a foothold with your name. But what you need to think about is breadth instead of depth.

Most Internet marketers think in terms of ranking one website for as many keywords as possible. That’s good, but it’s elementary. The most important principle to understand about reputation management is that Google – by far, the most important search engine (though Bing is gaining some small traction) – will only rank one page per website per keyword. Reputation management by its nature a name-focused, brand-focused keyword strategy.

What I mean by that is you aren’t targeting generic keywords, but your name or brand name. That’s a very specific type of SEO. And since Google will only rank one page on your site for your name or brand name then you need more web properties – or at least more pages that target your name or brand name. Therefore, you should have several social media accounts that you remain active on as well as your primary website and a few other websites. In fact, you probably want to secure your name as an URL and make a portfolio site, or what I like to call a reputation management tool.

The time for thinking of SEO as just a way to target keywords is over. It’s time to start thinking of search engine optimization as a reputation management tool.

Lately talk show and news hosts are living la vide loca since the outburst of Serena Williams and the rude conduct of Kanye West. The behavior of these celebrities in public made me think of the rude behavior I’ve seen in forums over the years. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a forum member apologize quite the way Kanye did.

Nevertheless, it was inspiring. Kanye goofed. He knows it. He apologized – publicly and with a private phone call. Taylor Swift is satisfied. So should we be. Right?

Well, yes. But what about that belligerent guy in the forum last week? He still hasn’t apologized.

To be fair, forum behavior has improved a lot in recent years. In the early days of the Net, flame wars were frequent. And many of them proved to be entertaining. Often, if there were two sides of an argument, they were both wrong. And while behavior has improved, we still run into the occasional jerk or nutjob who wants to pick an argument and run. We could all use a little self examination on that point. So the question is, how do you stop the rude behavior before it begins?

1. First, think before you hit send. Read your posts two or three times before posting them. Make sure you are saying what you want to say.
2. If you disagree with someone in a forum, do so in an agreeable manner. Don’t be an oaf.
3. Get a second opinion on a post before you post it. Ask a friend to look it over and e-mail it to a buddy and request feedback. Always try to give a measured response.
4. Don’t assume the other person was being rude. Sometimes things don’t come out the way we intended. Give the benefit of the doubt unless it was painfully obvious that the other party was intentionally stepping on toes.

Forums don’t have to be places for death matches. Watch your Ps and Qs and keep a level head.

Cybersquatting is the practice of using a domain name that is either 1) a recognized name brand and which would otherwise raise trademark or copyright suspicions if used in another context or 2) that is close enough to a recognized name brand that it could be confused with the name brand by unsuspecting consumers.

Examples of cybersquatting web addresses would include:

• Gogle.com
• searchengineotpimizationjournal.com
• wamlart.com
• mcdonallds.com

As you can see, the clear intent is to confuse people who might not notice the missing o in Google, the rearranged t and p in optimization, the rearranged l and m in Walmart, or the extra l in McDonalds.

One court ordered a cybersquatter to pay a hefty $33 million to Verizon for the nefarious activity. Perhaps this is a turning point in favor of honest business dealings online and cyber integrity.

Cybersquatting is a practice that is controversial and has been happening online since the early days of the Internet, but it has largely gone unpunished. The practice relies on searchers misspelling their search queries and landing on the fake site instead of the real one or by typing the incorrect address into their web browsers. Either way, an error could become a costly bit of confusion for the searcher and for the company whose name and brand are squatted. I guess we can chalk this one up to justice.