Creating a personal website is a great way to start promoting your online reputation. Since Google likes brands, this may help your website rank quickly under your personal name, as well as present you as serious and web-savvy.

So you’ve reached the obvious conclusion that you need to start building up a positive professional online presence for yourself. But where do you begin? The answer, in this case, is unequivocal. For personal reputation management, the first step to take is build a personal website bearing your name.

What is it good for?

1. Perfect online profile. When someone googles you, the results that come up on the first page are your online profile. You want the top results on that page to be the most relevant and the most flattering to you. A personal website should feature first on the list when searching for your name (or at least in the first three).
2. Dynamic mobility. It doesn’t matter if you use the site for presenting your resume, work portfolio, client reviews, or presenting new ventures to potential investors. A website allows you to match content to relevant audiences.
3. Stand out. Most people still don’t have their own personal websites. When someone searches for you on Google and finds that you have your own site, it positions you as a professional, and shows innovation and a good grasp of technology.
4. Improves your chance of standing out. Your site will come up in search engine results when your name is being searched for, but that’s not all. There’s a good chance that your site will feature in the results for other keywords that feature in the content that you’ve put up.
5. New skills. This has less to do with online presence, but going through this process once will show you how simple and easy it is to build a website. This is an important skill to have.
6. It’s fun to say “Google me!”, and it’s very effective too.

Setting up a personal blog – The cheap way

You can let blogger.com, wordpress.com or tumblr.com do the work for you. This kind of blog doesn’t require a domain name or a server to host your site. Signing up and starting the blog is really simple. The disadvantage is that the blog doesn’t sit on your domain, instead, it’s on the blogging platform’s domain. This kind of blog is less effective in terms of promoting your site, looks less professional, and also, if you ever decide to move over to a different platform or buy your own domain name, the blog’s address will change. This is obviously better than nothing, but it’s advisable to invest your time (and a bit of money) in building your own web domain.

Setting up a personal blog – The right way

Setting up a personal blog on your own web domain is a fairly simple and inexpensive process:

Step 1 – Buy a domain name:

To begin with, buy at least one domain name containing your full name, preferably ending in .com (.net is also OK), if the site is for the international community. If the site is meant to addressing specific country, for the Israeli market for example, you can stick with a second-level ‘.co.il’ domain. Obviously, if you’re looking to attract an international market and your name is Ben Cohen, you’re not going to find a top-level domain name available:

Setting up a personal blog – the right way

Setting up a personal blog on your own web domain is a fairly simple and inexpensive process.

Step 1 – Buy a domain name:

To begin with, buy at least one domain name containing your full name, preferably ending in .com (.net is also ok), if the site is for the international community. If the site is meant to be language-specific, for the Hebrew-speaking market for example, you can stick with a second-level ‘.co.il’ domain. Obviously, if you’re looking to attract an international market and your name is Ben Cohen, you’re not going to find a top-level domain name available:

In this case, you can purchase a domain name that begins with your name, with the addition of another word connected to your main profession. For example, if Bill Johnson is an aspiring author, billjohnsonwriting.com is a great solution.

I buy most of my domains through namecheap.com. It’s easy, fast, and they have great customer service in case you need some help.

Domain name cost: $11/year

Step 2 – Your site needs a place

A website is made up of a large number of files that need to be stored on some server connected to the internet. There are a number of different types of hosting service, but the one that suits almost all sites in the beginning is a shared hosting service. This means that your site will sit on a server that also hosts many other websites as well.

My recommended hosting service is bluehost.com.

Most of the hosting companies give more-or-less the same services, but from my experience, this company has an advantage in that they have good customer service, which is an important factor in choosing a hosting service.

Hosting cost: Starting from $4/month in the first year and rising to $12/month from the second year on.

Step 3 – Link your domain to your hosting

When users type your website address in their browser, they are meant to be redirected to the relevant server in order to upload the site they were looking for. This redirection is done using settings listed in the Name Servers (NS), in the management system of your domain. This is a simple process that takes less than a minute. You can figure out how its done fairly easily, or make use of the customer service of the domain provider.

Step 4 – Install the best content management system – for free

In the past, in order to build a static website, you had to be familiar with HTML, and in order to build a dynamic site that could be managed and regularly updated with fresh content, you would have to develop your own management system or purchase one.

These days it’s much easier. WordPress has a free content management system, and most hosting services allow you to install it for free straight from the control panel of the site. The system allows you to create pages, posts, menus, categories and much more. Everything can be edited simply and with no technical knowledge whatsoever.

Check out how to do this, or ask the hosting company’s customer service to help you out.

Step 5 – Content

It’s important to invest time and thought in the content that you want to present on your site. You shouldn’t build a website in order to have your resume up on the home page. If you’re not so good at writing, try and get help from professional content writers, or companies specializing in this.

The content on your site has to be original. Google really doesn’t like repeated content. Don’t copy text that already exists elsewhere on the internet onto your site (for example, your public Linkedin profile), and don’t copy text from your site elsewhere on the internet.

Conclusion

If you want to create an impressive online presence, a personal website is the right way to get started. If you’re not a technophobe and have some spare time, and want to learn something new, go for it. If not, for a small sum you can easily find one of thousands of companies and individual designers specializing in WordPress, who would be happy to set your site up for you.

This article doesn’t go too deep into the technical side of things. There are many sites and videos available online that delve into the details of how to do each of the stages outlined above. If you still get stuck with a question and need help with the process, we’d be happy to help you out, or to guide you to a relevant source.

Good luck!

Helpful Resources

If you are looking for help, Elance is the place to find someone who can help you:

www.elance.com

Recommended domain provider:

www.namecheap.com

Recommended hosting provider:

www.bluehost.com

How to build a wordpress website on less than 4 minutes. Great video by Pat Flynn (one of the best bloggers I know) from smartpassiveincome.com:

A few weeks ago, my iPad screen was cracked (actually, smashed) by one of my kids. I’ve got to say that despite its fragile appearance, it’s a pretty tough device. I managed to ignore the first crack, but after it was sat on twice more and fell five feet to the floor, I had no choice: the device worked, but I needed a new screen.

First thing I do is search on Yelp. The second thing is to Google the first three names (according to Yelp), and check out what people are saying about them in the search results.

This is what I got on Google:

• The first result had an ancient website, a mention in Yellow Pages, with no reviews, a lifeless Facebook page, and a reference to a lawsuit, mentioning customers who sued the service.
• The second result had a name so generic that I basically couldn’t find anything online that could give me more information about them.
• The third brand had a new website, recently updated, a Youtube channel with videos showing how to fix common problems, and lots of references on relevant technology sites.

Now, it might be that they all give great service, still, assuming they charge similar prices, which company would you go to?

Online promotion, SEO on Google, paid advertising and Facebook statuses can help in the short term. But if you want to build up and establish a private or commercial brand, you need online presence and high visibility on search engines. It can make the difference between being a huge success, and having a sluggish company or career.

Online presence and reputation management

Some people think that online reputation management is all about promoting good results on search engines, and getting rid of bad ones. It’s true that sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed, but reputation management also includes other services, such as journalistic content writing, SEO techniques and legal services. In general, it employs different services depending on the current situation:

• Monitoring – checking out the current situation. Monitoring is done at the beginning of the job, and repeated throughout.
• Reactive reputation management – Negative reviews, court cases, defamation, and embarrassing photos are enough to seriously damage your reputation. Promoting positive content and creating new web domains can push these results off the first page on Google.
• Proactive reputation management – Updating current web domains with fresh content, and increasing search engine results by adding new domains. This way, it’ll be harder to harm your reputation in the future.

All of these services are useful for both business and private clients (personal branding).

How do you know when you’re in trouble?

If any of the following is true, you’re probably not maximizing your online presence potential:

• You don’t have enough relevant information out there. You’re lacking web domains and search engine results, and you’re probably not active enough online in your industry.
• There’s relevant information, but most or all of it doesn’t show up on the first page of results, and is therefore basically irrelevant in terms of reputation.
• You have negative content out there. This is probably the worst situation to be in. Google doesn’t distinguish between true and false information, or between accurate and mistaken, positive or sarcastic, etc.

When you search your name, or your company’s name, in Google, the search engine shows you the sites and pages which are meant to be the most relevant to the search terms you typed in. Why “meant”? Because the results and ranking are absolutely automatic, performed by algorithms that take hundreds of different factors into account. This is why you’ll sometimes see results that would probably be ranked much, much lower if a human was arranging the results.

For example, if you type the word ‘Jew’ into Google, you can see on the top of the search results a weird ad, put up by Google itself:

If you follow the link, you’ll get to an explanation about how Google isn’t always satisfied with their own search results, and even apologizes for them. The reason for them putting the explanation out for this particular term is that the first page of results was showing several anti-Semitic sites for the word ‘Jew’.

The power to make or break a reputation in a few minutes, for free

We live in a world where technology is hurtling forward at a rapid pace. Social networks, blogs and review sites have become an inseparable part of our life, and are reflected in almost everything we do. This technology is a powerful tool, and a way of reaching out to an audience of 2.4 billion potential internet users. Julie Anne, an elementary school teacher from Tennessee, wanted to give her pupils an important educational message by using a photo and a short text:

The photo was posted about two weeks ago, and until now, has been shared 30,000 times and got millions of likes. Five minutes of preparation and zero budget got Julie Anne’s message across to the world, and built up her personal reputation.

Another example is Dave Carroll, who wrote a song about terrible customer service at a small aviation company called United Airlines, and uploaded it to Youtube. The result: United’s share price plummeted 10% and lost the shareholders 180 million dollars in just four days. Dave’s reputation actually improved, and he actually built up a career around it. Around two months ago, he gave a TED talk about his experience:

What other media platform can build or break a reputation so fast?

So, what do you do? Where do you work? Oh, that sounds really interesting, I’ve got to get you in touch with my partner. What’s your name again? The company’s name? Do you have a card?

If you’re in the midst of a career change, go to professional conferences, are an entrepreneur or a businessperson, you probably take part in this kind of conversation at least once a month.

One of the first thing you learn in business is to be able to whip out your ‘elevator pitch’. This is a very short summary (between thirty seconds and two minutes, where the first eight seconds are the most crucial), in which you explain exactly what it is you do, what service you provide, what product you have and what your company does. Anyone who’s tried writing a pitch like that knows that it’s not an easy challenge. Writing for someone who doesn’t know you or your company is a process that gets you thinking, and can inspire fresh insights such as “What do I actually do?”

What’s all this got to do with online reputation management? Assuming that the potential employer / partner / investor / date you just met at the conference wasn’t just being polite when they spoke to you, the next step they’ll take before arranging a meeting or calling you is search for your name on Google. It’ll take them a few seconds to judge whether what they see in the search results really reflects what you said in your elevator speech, and if not, your chances of ever seeing them again greatly diminish. In order to build up a perfect online reputation, follow the steps in this article.

1. Analyze your situation

Type your full name or your company’s name in Google, and make an Excel spreadsheet with all the results that come up on the first three pages. Decide what changes you’d like to make. Mark all the results that you’d like to come up first in green, and the ones you’d rather remove or push down, in red. Positive results are a subjective decision, of course, and what’s good for one person isn’t necessarily good for others. Businessmen don’t want to see an old enterprise, a personal blog, or social network profiles that don’t directly relate to their business come up in the first page of search results. But anyone who’s had lawsuits filed against them, or just doesn’t have relevant content out there, would be happy to have their social profile on page one.

2. Removing harmful content

In most cases, properly building up an online reputation includes distributing relevant original content about the brand or person whose reputation is being managed, and promoting this content to the first page of search results in a way that accurately reflects their reputation and experience in the real world. In some cases, however, the first page contains negative references such as old lawsuits, negative reviews, and even content intentionally written to harm your reputation, such as defamation and libel. In such case, you should first deal with the negative references and only afterwards continue to the following steps.

Removing harmful content (1) – start from the source

Try contacting the owner of the website and ask them to take down the harmful content. On big websites, the chances of this working are slim, but in the case of smaller sites there’s a good chance of being taken seriously, especially when the content is obviously offensive and damaging your reputation. In extreme cases, if the site manager refuses to take down the content, a letter from a lawyer can solve the problem.

Removing harmful content (2) – contacting the search engines themselves

The aim is to remove unwanted results from the search engines themselves, and especially from Google. In the (probable) case that the first step didn’t work, you can turn to the search engines:

Remove content from someone else’s site

You can find three content removal options:

• Remove content for legal reasons
• Remove personal information
• Remove content that’s not live

3. Creating branded online assets

Google prefers strong websites, sites that are considered authorities in their field. Google especially likes profiles on the leading social networking sites, and you can see that when you type someone’s name in Google, there’s a good chance that the first results will be their profile on Facebook, LinkedIn, or other well-known networks. Google indexes these sites much more frequently, and gives them an advantage in the page ranking.

The leading social networks that you should have an updated profile on are:

• Google+
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Flickr

Setting up a profile on a social network is quick and simple, but is absolutely useless if you don’t use it properly. Look what Seth Godin, a global marketing guru, has to say about it:

• Update relevant content regularly. Don’t bother opening a YouTube channel if you have nothing to put there.
• Gathering ‘friends’ whom you don’t know and have nothing to do with your field is a waste of time.
• Social networks are meant for two-way communication. One-way advertising isn’t effective.

To have Google index your site under the correct brand name, you have to do some basic site optimization: use your full name and not nicknames, place the brand name in the title, and, if possible, create a short URL that contains the brand name too. There are other things you can do to make your site Google-friendly, and take control of the title and description that Google displays in its results, but we’ll cover that in a separate guide.

4. Building a personal website

Having your own website using your brand name come up first on Google’s search results looks great and presents you as serious and web-savvy. Anyone looking to seriously improve their online reputation can and should create a website or a blog containing their resume, media reports, and their own articles. Online resumes are steadily replacing traditional ones. How can you do all this? You have two choices:

• Setting up a personal blog on a popular blogging platform (The cheapest way).
• Setting up a personal blog on your own web domain (The recommended way).

5. Promoting positive results and demoting negative results

If you ask Siri (Apple’s virtual assistant app) where to bury a corpse, you’ll get a serious answer (try it yourself, or look it up on Youtube!) If you ask a cynical SEO guy the same question, he’ll probably tell you “on the third page of Google”…

Getting rid of negative results (or results that are simply irrelevant to your reputation) is done by ranking results that we want to emphasis, and thus pushing the negative results down the ranks.

Here are the results of a study, which show why it’s so important for your reputation that you appear on the first page of Google (Chitika 2013):

You can easily see that, on average, 92% of web traffic comes from sites listed on the first page of Google. 32.5% comes from the first result on the page, 17.6% from the second, and 11.4% from the third. Only 8% of web traffic ever gets to sites not listed on the first page of search results on Google.

Google’s search algorithm takes hundreds of factors into consideration when calculating the position for each search term. The two most important are:

• Internally optimized sites and pages. Just by optimizing the page in the right way, we can help Google understand what the main keyword that describes the page. In most cases, it’s enough to have the brand name (your name or your company’s) in the title tag and in the Meta description.
• The number and strength of the links leading to the page you’re trying to promote. For a start, make sure that all your online assets link to each other, and that your blog links to your social networks and vice versa.

If you have a way of getting links from other websites to your site, that’s great, as long as they’re relevant sites and not full of spam. If you want to promote your site using competitive keywords, which are not necessarily your brand name, it’s best to turn to a professional SEO company.

6. Privacy settings on social networks

Anything private should stay private. Make sure that only the information that you wouldn’t mind seeing online is visible to others. Having an embarrassing photo online is no longer only a celebrity’s problem. Everyone can be harmed by incorrect privacy settings. Deleting unflattering photos and taking control of the privacy settings on Facebook and LinkedIn is absolutely necessary. Read the guides on this site for how to do that best.

Conclusion

The whole issue of reputation management by pushing negative results away is legitimate and legal, even according to Google. This is what they write about it:

“If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business.” (Google Support).

Building and maintaining social network profiles on relevant platforms, setting up your own website and promoting existing content, all this will cause unwanted negative content to be buried deep down the results list, and will let you have the first page of Google filled with content you can be proud of, to the point where you can finish your elevator pitch with a confident “Google me!”

“Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.” (Victor Hugo)

You get to a professional conference, sign up at the entrance and clip on your nametag, peek at your phone and see that you’ve arrived a bit early. Good time to grab a coffee and croissant before the refreshments stall gets too crowded. As you sip, you take a look around, trying to find colleagues for small-talk to fill up the time until the lectures start. They always start late.

After a brief introduction – “Hey! How are you? How you doing? What’s going on?” –  conversation gets a bit stilted, and every now and then you look to the side, until you notice something really weird: on the wall behind you there’s a big poster with your name and a stupid lawsuit that some angry customer took out on you a couple years back. On the other wall, there are a few family photos you’d rather not share with the people at the conference, and just below, an unflattering review of an unsuccessful product your company put out back in 2009.

Does this sound unrealistic? At a conference, maybe, but on the internet this how you appear, and this is how you look to anyone who’s ever taken a business card from you, who would like to get to know you, and who’d like hire you, try out your products or widen their circle of acquaintances. Many research papers show the huge effect that your online reputation has on people’s decision making once they search for you or your company.

It takes three seconds to type your name into Google, and another few seconds to scan the results. Search results on Google’s first page with your updated profile, your certification, awesome reviews from the last few years mentioning your name – all of these can determine your future, and the success of your business.

So what is online reputation management?

Online reputation management is basically a service that allows you to control the way search engines display results involving your brand, whether it’s your personal name or your company’s. This way, the most relevant results, which you’d like to be made visible, are shown to those searching for information. Reputation management comes to bridge the gap between the way your brand really looks (or the way you want it to be seen), and the way it’s portrayed on the internet.

 

“80% of reputation damage is a result of incompatibility between buzz and reality.” (Digimind)

 

Online reputation is a combination of two fields: online public relations, and search engine optimization (SEO). Many SEO companies now offer reputation management services as well. While SEO certainly plays an important part in reputation management campaigns, it’s important to realize that high-quality reputation campaigns need a lot more than just SEO.

How are you affected by your online reputation?

Much, much more than you think. It’s enough just to take a look at the statistics to see how relevant your online reputation is:

• 92% of consumers trust information found over the internet more than any other source.
• 70% of consumers check out online ratings and reviews before they buy a product.
• 87% of consumers connect the personal reputation of the CEO to the reputation of his or her company.
• 70% of recruitment managers in the USA have rejected candidates for a job, just because of information they found about them on the internet.

Today, consumers are smarter, and before buying any kind of service or product, they look it up on search engines, social networks, and specific websites whose core function is to organize and rank relevant products and services. Customers, business associates, employers, investors, and potential dates – they’re all searching for you online, and the first impression they have of you will be based on what they find when they scan through the search results. The question is: will they like what they see?