April 10th, 2010 by Mike

Most internet sites benefit from online reputation management strategies. This is where a good SEO company can help. They generally cover all aspects of link building, not just search engine optimization via keyword content, and will offer a range of link building services to show your e-Commerce site in the best possible light.

One sure-fire way of improving your online reputation is via social media marketing. Next to SEO, it’s a must for any website. Like SEO, SMM involves driving traffic to your site. You need to have an effective business plan in operation, one that allows you to monitor your links in order to see how well they are performing, so it’s important you don’t set up links willy-nilly on dozens of sites. Instead, concentrate on getting quality links on a few high profile sites that will guarantee a steady stream of traffic from people with an interest in your kind of product.

There are seemingly hundreds of social media sites out there, many of which are of little use to the average online entrepreneur. However, if you have a specialist product or service, it may be worth your while implanting links and seeing how they do against more mainstream sites, in the same way as targeting specialist directories and search engines for SEO purposes. Here is a short list of some of the most popular sites:

Digg. We’ve all seen the “Digg This” button embedded on sites. Like Twitter, it has become almost de rigueur on e-Commerce sites. Digg is a user-generated social news site where members submit links to stories, videos etc that are then commented on, voted on or buried by other members. Getting on the front page of Digg is very labour-intensive, but can result in thousands of people clicking on your link, leading to lasting search engine optimization success.

Newsvine is a similar site to Digg, but has the benefit of a higher level of social interaction between members, and your own subdomain name. Make sure to include keywords in your profile.

Delicious. Previously (and rather clunkily) known as Del.icio.us, this is a social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo, where members save bookmarks to sites they’ve discovered. Using tags, users can tag their own site content. Entries have “nofollow” links, to discourage spam, meaning links will have no value on your page rankings in the search engines. However, though you won’t achieve “link love” you can get a high click-through rate and increased sales, as browsers discover your links through the Delicious search engine index.

StumbleUpon is an internet community and discovery site. It uses social networking and personal recommendation to link members to internet sites, videos and images based on their interests. There are many other sites you can use for SMM purposes. Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia need no introduction, but also consider Reddit, Spurl, Flickr and MySpace.

Social media optimisation is a powerful online reputation management tool, but to be successful the content must be linkable and attractive to browsers. Plan your campaign carefully.

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