Happy Halloween

Hope everyone has a safe and fun Halloween.

The only thing I would pipe in about is don't do anything you don't want to show up on the search engines the following day.

This is the best way to avoid embarrassing things showing up on the search engines.

If you must make a foul of yourself, at least you were warned.

Google Changes

So if you have been using social networks only to try and push out any unwanted listings you might have found you lost some results recently.

That is because Google seems to have done a little change that really only effected people do that sort of thing. A few of the social networks lost some of their power and authority.

Now it wasn't much but if you had an article on a newspaper that you didn't want to see it might be coming back (or something similar).

One of the best remedies is to put out some optimized press releases on a web wire service with links to what you do want to show up.

What this change really shows is, you need to have several strategies in place and make sure they are all being maintained so you keep up any changes.

Watch Yourself

Part of keeping track of your reputation online includes knowing what people are saying about you as soon as they say it.

There are several things you should set up to do this.

First get yourself some sort of RSS reader (definition below), I use Google Reader. You want this so that you can subscribe to several feeds and be able to get the information sent to you automatically.

Then you are going to want to subscribe to the following feeds:

1) Go to Google and do a search for your brand name or your own name. Then along the top bar find the "news" link and click it. On the left side you will see a link to "RSS", click on that to add it to your reader.

2) Go back to Google and do the search again. This time pull-down the link found at "more" and the down arrow and pick "blogs". Again on the left side you will see a link to "RSS", click on that to add it to your reader.

3) Go to http://search.twitter.com/ and do another search for your name or brand. Click on "Feed for this query" near the top right and add this one to your reader too.

4) Not go to http://www.technorati.com/ and do the same search. Here you click on "subscribe" above and on the right of the results to add this one to your reader.

5) Finally go to Yahoo search engine and do that same search again. Again click on the "more" and the down arrow and pick "news". You have to hunt for the link a little bit here, it is at the bottom of the right column and you will click on the orange RSS.

This will keep you in the know for the most part. There are places you can pay for this service which will be more comprehensive but this is how to do this for free.



Definitions:
RSS - Because there are different versions of RSS, the term RSS is most frequently used as a name to mean the syndication of Web content, rather than as an acronym for its founding technology (most commonly stands for Really Simple Syndication). A Web site that wants to allow other sites to publish some of its content creates an RSS document and registers the document with an RSS publisher. A user that can read RSS-distributed content can use the content on a different site. Syndicated content can include data such as news feeds, events listings, news stories, headlines, project updates, excerpts from discussion forums or even corporate information.

Protecting Your Identity

I have had some people ask me about protecting their identity online.

You would be amazed how much information you accidentally let people know about yourself which someone could use to find you.

I few key areas to keep in mind so that you protect yourself:

• If you live in a big city it is probably ok to mention the city, for example Los Angeles. If you live in a smaller city I would change the name to some code name which you will remember.
  
• Use code names for family and friends. I have a personal blog which I use to keep track of how my kids grow and expand. However I use a code name for my daughter so her name never gets out there.
  
• Many places that you share photos on allow you to set it so only friends can see the pictures. Realize that whenever you put a photo up without some sort of protection like that, it can end up in the search engines. However you should realize that even photos that only friends can see, don't mean those friends can't copy it and put it somewhere else.

For the most part, just keep your nose clean and make sure you use commonsense when interacting on the Internet.

The World Wide Web Can be Hard to Confront

I have been working in the various aspects of Internet Marketing since 1996. I have answered MANY people's questions about search engine optimization, email marketing, banner ads and more recently social media marketing and so on.

I will answer any question and have been told that I can explain things in such real and simple terms that anyone can understand it.

The one thing that I have found I do different then most other people who explain things, is I actually try to answer the most basic question, the one that once understood makes it easier to understand the more specific and work out other new slightly different things for themselves.

For example, I have found many people don't understand how a website address works and what all the parts actually mean.

People are surprised to hear that you read one from right to left.

First is ".com" or ".org", etc. which means a business or non-profit respectively.

Anyone can purchase anything .org and they own it. For example we own "internet-image.net" and have control of that address.

We can now put anything in front of it "www.internet-image.net" or even "silly.internet-image.net".

Each "." separates the levels of an Internet address. It can go on for a long time (no one has ever tested the limit, but who would write that all to visit a website).

1st level is: .net
2nd level is: internet-image.net
3rd level is: www.internet-image.net
4th level could be: more.www.internet-image.net
and so on...

Since I own internet-image.net I can do anything I want on the 3rd level, I don't have to do www. but since most people assume that, most of us that decide the website address, go ahead and make it work.

That is an example of something that most people actually don't know. I will probably come back here and define a few more things that I have often found people don't understand.

If you have any specific questions on this, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Pictures of yourself on Facebook

One of the most common things I have heard is that someone is looking for a job. They just interviewed with the HR department at some big XYZ company and are waiting to hear back.

What they don't realize at the time is that the HR department is doing a search on Google for their name. They are finding their facebook account, or their myspace, maybe their twitter account and reading all that stuff you were doing while in college (or highschool depending on your age).

Now, if they really see that picture of you in your underwear, next to the tower of bear cans are the more or less likely to hire you?

Word of advice, clean up all that stuff before you start going seriously looking for a job or anything where people are going to be checking you out before using you.

And The Blogging Begins

I have been working in the search engine optimization field since 1996, yes, a long time...

I started there and have grown from it, I expanded into Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing and was consulting business on their strategy.

My favorite thing to do is to help people though, make sure that the true and real information is there and no one gets to bash them for wrong reasons.

Then I met Charli and discovered she had a lot of the same interests. While her background isn't marketing heavy, she has a great time with computers and was soaking up anything and everything I told her.

So Internet Image Management (IIM) was born and we are excited. We are off to a great start with several clients with absolutely no promotion other than us telling people what we are doing.

So, here we go, lets have a great time.