Search Engine Optimization NEWS

No matter how good your company is, some people will always write something negative about your site, even if you tried your best to help them.

Some customers might write negative comments about your company in their blogs or some of your competitors might like to damage your reputation by creating fake comments about your site.

What can you do if web pages with negative comments appear on Google’s first result page for your company name?

1. Fix the problem
If people write negative reviews about your company, the first thing that you should do is to fix the problem that caused the negative review.

2. It doesn’t hurt to ask
Send the webmaster of the web page with the negative review a polite email and ask for removal of the negative comments. Many webmasters will cooperate if you explain the issue.

3. Give web pages with positive comments a boost
If the webmaster does not want to remove the negative review, find websites that contain positive comments about your site. Link to these pages from your own website to increase the link popularity of these pages. The more links the pages with the positive reviews have, the higher they will be ranking in the search results. If appropriate, bookmark web pages with positive remarks about your website on social bookmark sites such as Digg and Delicious.

4. Ask for testimonials from happy customers
If you receive positive feedback from customers, ask them to write a review on ConsumerReview.com, Epinions.com or similar sites.

5. Add your website to company wiki pages
Websites like AboutUs.org allow you to create an article about your company. If your company is important enough, you might even create an entry in Wikipedia. These Wiki pages will also appear in the search results when someone searches for your company name.

6. Make sure that your own website tops the search results
If your own website comes first for your company name then most people will click on your link and don’t look further. Use MHS to make sure that your own web site has position 1 in the search engine results.
Removing negative comments from the search engine results can take some time. It’s best to avoid negative experiences at the outset by providing high quality products and good customer support.

Most people use a keyword suggestion tool when they try to find new keywords for their campaigns. While keyword suggestion tools are good, they should not be the first step in your keyword research activities.

Before you use a keyword suggestion tool, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What problems can your product or your service solve?
2. Which questions do potential customers ask?
3. Can you offer unusual solutions?
4. Which products and services do you offer?

As you can see, the products and services that you offer are the least important. A person with a headache might not now that the Shiatsu that you offer will help them. They even might now know what Shiatsu is and if they know it, they might not be able to spell it properly. The same applies to all other services and industries.

For that reason, it is important that you focus on the first three points before using your products or services in the keywords.

1. What problems can your product or service solve?

In this example, the problem that your product or service can solve is a headache. Create a list of words that describe the problem:

headache, racking headache, migraine, vicious headache, splitting headache, megrim, constant headache, etc.

2. Which questions do potential customers ask?

People type different things in Google’s search box when they try to find a solution to their problem. Here are some real queries that have been done on Google (use STN’s keyword suggestion tool to find keywords that are searched by real web surfers):

• why does my head hurt
• why does my head hurt when I cough
• how to get rid of migraines without medication
• how to get rid of migraines when pregnant
• why can’t i concentrate on anything
• why am i so tired
• etc.

The problem that your product solves creates certain circumstances (fatigue, temper, concentration problems). Address these circumstances in your keyword phrases.

The problem can also be connected to another factor (for example migraine and pregnancy). Create keyword phrases that are related to these factors.

3. Can you offer unusual solutions?

Most people will take a pill when they have a headache. In this example, you offer a solution that many people don’t know about (Shiatsu). The following phrases would work for you:

• get rid of migraines without medication
• get rid of headache without pills

The unusual solutions that you offer can also be used in your AdWords ad copy and on your web pages. For example, you might create web pages around the following topics:

• How to get rid of headaches without using Aspirin
• An unusual way of healing migraine without medication
• etc.

4. Which products or services do you offer?

Of course, you should also use the names of the products and services that you offer in your ads and SEO campaigns. In this example, this would be:

shiatsu, shiatsu massage, etc.

When you try to find new keywords, tell a short story that describes the problem and the solution: “A person has a racking headache. The person cannot concentrate because of that headache and the person is tired. Instead of taking a pill, there can be other solutions. That solution is my Shiatsu service.”

By doing this, you’ll find many keywords around which you can create new web pages and PPC ads. Of course, you can also combine this method with Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool as well as our Keyword Suggestion Tool.

1. websiteoptimization.com

From the website: Website Performance Tool And Web Page Speed Analysis. This site analyses a url and gives a web page speed report. You can use it to determine page load times and drill down to page objects that slow down load times.

Pay close attention to the recommendations at the end of the report. For example if the total number of images exceed a certain size, the report will point this out to you. Best of all, the recommendations are in a easy-to-understand language and I found them very practical.

2. sitescore

From the website: Sitescore is a free tool which rates how well designed, popular and accessible your website is. And that’s what this nifty site tool does.

sitescore assigns a score to your website on the following criteria:

Marketing, Design, Accessibility, Experience and Visitor Rating. It also provides an overall score. It gives a summary of the good and bad points of your site and a detailed breakdown of what it means and suggestions for improving.

3. smartpagerank.com

From the website: The Easy Way To Check And Monitor Your Page Rank. As the site name suggests, this tool is more focussed on the pagerank. It does offer other interesting details on the site that’s being checked like a cute thumbnail of the page, number of backlinks (links pointing to your site), alexa rank, number of pages indexed by search engine etc. One interesting tidbit this site offers is the value of your website in US dollars! I don’t know how it calculates it, but I thought that was pretty interesting!

4. webwait.com

From the website:WebWait is a website where you can measure the speed of other websites. It times precisely how long the website takes to load and render in your browser, including any images, stylesheets, and Javascript.

Webwait has a neat interface and measures the speed of a website. The tests are more complex than your average speed rating sites. Webwait makes multiple passes and takes into account cookies, images, CSS and javascripts.

5. smallbusinesshub.com

This site, among other things, has a neat web grading tool. The site is a little slow, but the wait is worth it. The tool grades your site and provides ranking from various sources like Google, Technorati, Alexa and Delicious. Recommendations are provided in areas that need improvement. Overall, an excellent resource to check your website or blog.