I’m live blogging a reputation management session at SphinnCon Israel. The moderator is Vannesa Fox (ninebyblue). The speakers are Shira Abel (Abel Communications), Sam Michaelson (Fiveblocks), Dan Gerstenfeld (Interteam), and Gil Reich (Answers.com).

Shira Abel: How to Control the Noise (and deal with a management reputation problem)

Look at rep management issue as an opportunity. Companies and individuals are often judged by how they handle the issue and control the noise. The Lower Merion school system installed webcams in the laptops of students, and people found out about it, and the news media went crazy.  What should they have done? Think about breaking the story themselves. Do something immediately after the story breaks – silence costs reputation and trust. They should have given out as much info as possible…but they didn’t. If there is more information and noise coming from one side, then that side will win in reputation.

Gil Reich: How to use Q and A sites to build your reputation

Engage others. Create value. Be memorable. Bring friends.

Example: Best Buy Metals. Owner joins Yahoo! Answers and give out useful info, then talks about himself, then gives more useful info. As long as you are contributing value, you can get some self-promotion out of it. Other Yahoo! Answers searchers will see the answer and get value from it. Yahoo! Answers are also searched by Google – turns out that his answer is ranked #2 for this specific question.

Another example: give a lot of good quality, targeted answers to build up reputation in a competitive market. One guy’s answers are ranked very high in shopping because he answered a lot of questions about a specific product niche.

Answers sites: Yahoo! Answers is largest ranked (43 mil), WikiAnswers, then Linkedin Answers (for whole site).

Q & A Sites: Community Q & A sites get about 100 million unique visitors/month from the US alone.There are both consumer and B2B sites, many sites allow multiple answers, some are wiki sites, some have questions open for days and best answers are selected (opportunity for more traffic if your answer is selected), and consider horizonal vs. niche answers sites. Niche sites are stackoverflow, wikianswers. Aardvark is another one. Yedda is an Israeli site.

How to become an answer god: Ask questions, answer questions with useful questions, interact and follow-up when you’ve answered or asked, don’t lose control and remember everything is listed by google…forever.

Quick ROI Analysis – answering questions at 7 mins per answer is a lower cost/conversion than cost/conversion on a successful PPC campaign. Over 90% of people who use business Q & A find it useful for business-survey results. (This is my favorite quote: “if there are A-listers in the industry you are stalking, then you can use Q & A to attract their attention.”)

Dan Gerstenfeld: 67% of top executives regard their company’s online reputation as vulnerable. How would you want your company to be presented in a crisis situation? Take control of the situation by putting info on it on your website: answer questions, give information (positive and negative), and the SERP results will reflect how you are proactively handling the issue.

How to be proactive? Define an overall PR and social media marketing strategy. Adopt a hands-on approach with good listening tools and handle all responses yourself. Be proactive. Network with others online. Create a place online that people know about, that people will know where to go to if a crisis breaks out. Optimize your content online.

Sam Michaelson: Reputation Management Pitfalls for the client and the service provider

Client pitfalls: biggest thing that clients do wrong is not being prepared in advance. Look at the names of people in the company  – and buy the domains of their names as well as the defensive use of the names (such as thispersonsucks.com). Own your own name! Make sure you own your own keywords and properties related to the top ten search results.

Another pitfall: Clients forget to use simple means when they are available, such as calling someone to take down the bad info if you know the person. Sometimes it’s that easy!

Service Provider Pitfalls: Really bad to optimize pages that have comments on them because you never know what the next comment will say. Optimizing pages that might change (news sites, wikipedia). Don’t forget to take control of the top ten sites…bad things may be coming.  Not setting clear expectations may be a problem – you will always get a client coming back after months thinking you’re giving them poor results. Not optimizing sites you build into top spots. Missing what the client really wants. Misunderstanding the perception of your role.

A few conclusions:

1. Have a reputation management plan and be proactive.

2. How you handle a reputation management issue affects how people see you in search engine results.

3. Think about a Q & A answers strategy to build your reputation AND rank for search engine results.

4. There are a lot of missed opportunities and pitfalls in brand management – avoid the big pitfalls.

I’m a SphinnCon Israel, a conference about SEO and search marketing, and live blogging the sessions. The first session is a moderated panel entitled SEO Fundamentals. The panelists are Eli Feldman (RankAbove), Menachem Rosenbaum (TENS Technology), Uri  Breitman (TBWA Digital), Itay Paz (Itaypaz.net), and moderated by Barry Schwartz (SearchEngineLand.com and RustyBrick). OK folks, this session may be a bit techy, but hopefully by capturing this information for you, you’ll gain some information about how to use search engine optimization to help your blog, website, cause and brand! Let the live blogging begin:

Eli Feldman: The old way of thinking about search engine results = above the fold on Google search results, and everyone will look “above the fold.” Now: there is “fully integrated universal results” and it takes up spot from the SERP. Live results are added. Videos are groups on first page. The big changes – get all types of results on the first page, options to search by types of search, and lots of different kinds of search options.

Major change for video is coming: Google has started grouping video results in the regular search results. You see them in packs of two or four on the page. If the video makes it to the front page, you’ll get better rank all the sudden because of this. It doesn’t matter if your video was ranked 89, because if Google shows it with a high-ranking video on the Google search page, your lower video’s rank is pulled up.

How to get video to come into the Google results and take advantage of the “packs:” utilize the video sitemap (like an XML sitemap), liste in sitemap index, include new tags (content, player, thumbnail location, categories, if family-friendly). If your URL is too long, it won’t show up in Google search – it must be less than 60 characters. Will only show up if it is family-friendly.

We are seeing Google show live results, latest news results, on search returns. You can go to trends.google.com and see the latest news trends/news results. If you are in a newsworthy area, your company may come up on the trends results.

Add content into this media, or around this media, as much as you can. Example: put up an image, add text to it with context and captions, tags, comments, translation. In YouTube video, you can add transcripts. For Flickr, you can add info about the type of camera used, and other meta data.

Rules for Video SEO: optimize every aspect of the video (title, description, tag), look at internal backlinks from you tube (comments/groups), external backlinks.

Itay Paz: SEO tips, tricks and fundamentals

Important to have good tags, of course. However, it’s all about content nowadays. Valuable content = traffic generation. Hard to trick search engines with lots of mediocre content. Site maps are critical: build as many site maps as you can – Google likes it. Write about trending topics and “hot” news, which will help bring traffic to your site and help you with rank. Google likes WordPress – a lot, indexes it almost immediately. Use the SEO plugs inside WordPress for SEO – there are a lot of ones to choose from. Incoming links: have to have valuable links pointing to your website. Friendly URLs – keywords inside a URL is a good idea. Control outgoing links – think about the number of outgoing links and not having too many outgoing links. Be SOCIAL – if you put out a lot of content on networks, you’ll gather incoming links and traffic. Blogs give great traffic and links into the website.

Uri Breitman: Talking about keyword research – it’s important to do keyword research for everything, even to prepare to meet with an SEO team. Use the Google Keyword Tool and use it every day – it’s amazing. Then, go back and research using the keywords you found. Find new keywords in the search, then go back to the Keyword Tool, and it involves re-thinking and re-researching. Check the guys who are ranked above you because they know what they’re doing. Prioritize with what you should do with main keywords.

In order to figure out keywords, think about this: Who am I? What is my core business? What would I search for if I were going to search for my company? What would a client look for? Call clients! Ask clients how they found you, and how they found your competitors.

Google Keyword Tool is great. Using that, check the “broad match,” the “phrase match,” and the “exact match.” ALWAYS check the exact. Look at what the competition is doing, and the prices for top keywords in AdWords. Can be a good indication of what’s going on in the organic search field. Beware of keywords that attract a lot of competition, but don’t generate SALES.

Prioritize: most popular keywords, most suitable keywords. Go for regional keywords which may have best conversion. First-step keywords (the ones you thought about at the very first of your keyword search) may not have been the best keywords.

Finalize your list:  make a short list, have modest objectives, (don’t get into street fights over keywords!), it will take time to move your site up, prepare to make changes, and use web analytics for keyword traffic data so that you can monitor every small change, check rankings using 3rd party tool (not your own computer which will give you the wrong results!)

Menachem Rosenbaum: How to judge link building success? What happens if you are building links and you don’t see results? How to judge results quickly? Google webmaster tools is how Google sees your website on the internet. Look at the diagnostics crawl stats in webmaster tools for crawl information. If we want Google to crawl as many pages as possible. Each website has a www.yourwebsite.com and a yourwebsite.com URL. Make sure that you have a www.yourwebsite.com that redirects to the one with the www. in the beginning to get the most crawling of the site from Google. Bottom line: the more often Google comes back, the more authority you have. Lower crawl stats, or crawl stats not improving, it reflects in your ranking.

Takeaways:

1. Video search returns in Google can be a huge boost for your video. Optimize for a higher chance that will happen.

2. Social search within Google is huge, and will continue to grow.

3. Google Keyword Tool is great, and critical for your site. Use it as a guide.

4. Content is still king. Good incoming links are also incredibly valuable.