Google absolutely adores Squidoo, and I have discussed several times how the network can be used for the purposes of search engine optimization. But Squidoo has a few younger siblings that shouldn’t be overlooked in a comprehensive link building effort, the most advanced and spidered of which seems to be HubPages. But what is HP, and how exactly can it complement your online marketing efforts?

After you register and open an account, pick a topic and create a new hub. The process is pretty self explanatory, but make sure you choose an objective topic and name for your lens so that it doesn’t appear like a blatant marketing ploy. Also, as you are allowed to select your URL, get some keywords or your brand name in there. If your first choice is taken, try a few different variations or use hyphens between words (pinkrhinocerousbattery can be pink-rhinocerous-battery).

Back to the subject matter of your lens - people are more likely to visit or link to your hub if it is perceived as an objective resource. If your company sells mixing bowls, create a hub with free recipes. Do you offer gym apparel? Build a lens which focuses on workout tips. Somewhere within your hub, likely one of their text modules, hyperlink to your company site using the word mixing bowls. Make sense?

But where else can you get content for your new hub? HubPages can pull in RSS very well. Build a custom RSS feed filtered to your key term or subject matter. Or visit a relevant site or blog and see if they offer a feed for syndication. You can also utilize photo, link, news and Amazon modules - with more being introduced all the time. You can get a decent, content filled Hub off the ground in under an hour. Once it is spidered by Google and Yahoo that’s another prominent incoming link working in your favor. Give it a shot, use your imagination and add HubPages to your SEO arsenal and best practices.

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My sister sent me this video - presumably because she’s secretly mocking my profession of choice. This clip doesn’t make me want to navigate over to this handsome bastard’s site as much as maybe… take a shower. Based on the comments on the post-specific YT page, I am not alone.

If we, the public, were called upon to perform a service to this gentleman by offering constructive criticism to his efforts, I think it would likely go something like this:

• Spell your ultra-long URL properly on your splash screen. Unless of course a bluerpint is actually some kind of Belgian beer that I don’t know about.
• There is a tuxedo rental shop somewhere in Minnesota that is missing a men’s jacket size 14.
• Remember back in the late 1990’s when LLCool J would wear one leg of his sweat pants rolled up? It never really caught on, and someone should tell Gary here that the ‘one lapel flip’ won’t fare much better.
• Rodney Dangerfield called. He wants his tie knot back.
• I have seen hostage videos in which the subjects looked more comfortable. Is there a rabid grizzly bear on a chain just off camera? “Right, who’s doesn’t?” Strasberg is turning in his grave.
• The Shakespeare beard should be limited to sex offenders and poet laureates. Oh eye of newt and tongue of frog and link of Digg! Hast thou forsaken me?
• The dual eyebrow raise-head jerk move might be a precursor to a more serious neurological disorder. I kept waiting for him to yell “cock farts frigging slut monkeys!” at the end of every sentence.

Ladies, please form a line to the left. This guy should really be teaching a class in social heartbreaking, being Valentine’s Day and all.

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Still Another Update: www.RegisterFlies.com

Another Update: Enom has stepped up to the plate and completely severed their ties with RegisterFly. They have created an FAQ which will allow you to transfer domains from RF back to Enom. Since our domain is technically expired, this is going to be an even bigger hassle than a normal domain push. I am going to call Enom in the morning and see what can be done. I have also backordered the domain in question through GoDaddy in case I get lucky. Pray for the kids.

Update: Apparently we are not alone. Has RegisterFly.com stolen our domain name? “It seems RegisterFly has gotten themselves into a lot of trouble recently for their practices and have been banned by Enom from registering domain names in the future.” Who else has this happened to, and what can we do about it?

I have never blogged for the purposes of evil before. In fact, I pride myself on my burgeoing online reputation management abilities. I do so now only because I have come up against service provider treachery the likes of which would make Carol Beer cringe. “Domain registrar says no.”

I help run a website for a non-profit community center here in Boston’s North End. I took over webmastering duties when the first guy moved away and I never bothered to transfer the domain name to my registrar of choice. I didn’t see the need. Instead, I left it at RegisterFly.com with whom I had no prior dealings. I am not going to play the ‘who let the domain expire‘ blame game here. I had access to the RF account - but I did not renew it before it technically expired (never got an email telling me expiration was imminent like I do everywhere else) and one day in December I got a panicked call from one of the center’s principals wondering why the site was down.

Long story short - it is two months later and after a barrage of calls to RegisterFly and its controlling entity, Enom, the site is still down and the domain unrenewed. I have moved it to a .org as a plan ‘B’, but refuse to rest until someone has at least explained to me why we’ve been ignored to the extent that we have. RegisterFly support tickets simply tell me there is a delay and to ‘just wait’. Enom doesn’t know we’re alive.

Yes, I am in a vendetta sort of mood tonight, but I’m also hoping a few tags will draw some Technorati traffic from folks who are experiencing the same issue with this collective set of jokers. It would be a shame if someone at the Boston Globe caught wind of my non-profit being cornholed in this fashion. I played a cop in the fundraising play this year, for goodness sake. I wore makeup. I’m pissed. We’re only trying to help the kids, Enom. Do the right thing and call a brother. I did a little research to no real avail - Does anyone know what the heck is going on with these two companies?

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What exactly is online brand reputation management (BRM)? Basically, negative or malicious press in SERPS (search engine results pages) can be combated by creating positive content or and knowing where to post or submit it. If the positive content is deemed by the search engines to appear on more integral websites, the negative rankings will be pushed farther and farther down the SERPs until that post by a disgruntled blogger is on page three and your good name has been restored.

Brand reputation management and search marketing were once very separate entities – but with the emergence of blogs, forums, social media and other user-driven content sites, they now must be performed in tandem. You don’t have to be a skilled programmer, or even know how to build a website, to get your opinions online anymore - This can be a very scary prospect for any company. If you’re not scared, you should be. Boo.

How do you combat a high-ranking negative reference to your name or company? Luckily, it is far easier to attain good rankings for a business or domain name because there is far less competition for these words than for the goods or services they provide. It is also reasonable to push down negative rankings for individual people’s names. But not always, obviously. If your client’s name is Gavin Wunderschnitzen, you’re laughing. If your BRM services have just been retained by John Smith, just give him his money back now.

The same blogs, forums and social media sites which can be used to negate or slur a brand, can be used to defend it. Here are some of my methods, and I look forward to your feedback and tips on the subject. Lots of folks are selling BRM as a service nowadays, but before you cannibalize a considerable part of your marketing budget because some 12 year old with a Bebo account and a crap in their diaper didn’t like one of their Christmas presents, consider the following Free BRM tips.

1. Well-written, newsworthy press releases are a great BRM tool for simultaneous direct traffic and SERP manipulation. Even if you’re using free PR networks, they will still make a visible impact if your targeted name or company is reasonably unique. Ask your client if they have any existing traditional releases that you can repurpose online quickly.
2. Build a Kiva.org lender profile page for your client. You’ll probably want to donate at least $25, but there’s no harm in building your karma while building your rank. Google seems to treat Kiva with very high regard. Hat tip to Dan Zarrella for this one.
3. Build Squidoo lenses and HubPages for your client. Use their name in the title and URL - as in both cases you get to pick it yourself - and it is static. This works absolute wonders, regardless of whether or not your lens on Sea Monkeys made any affiliate revenue last year. Oops, that’s mine.
4. Build a Blogger account for your client, and use their name in the title and URL. Don’t fret too much about content - use their mission statement or About Us page and split it into a few posts. Leave it to simmer and watch what happens.
5. Social Media/Networking sites with more of a professional audience - Your LinkedIns and your Facebooks as opposed to your Friendsters and MySpaces - will get indexed quickly and rise just as fast. Build profiles for your clients, post haste.
6. The next step is indexing - Now that you’ve built 7 profiles, a blog, 2 lenses and a hub what next? Get it all spidered lickety-split by linking to each from the sidebar of the blogger account you just created and then linking to that from your client’s site - or another juicy property that gets crawled regularly.
7. Build a custom RSS feed for the phrase you want to protect. Use the Yahoo! News tool to watch for negative stories or press releases, and a Technorati feed to monitor the blogosphere. This way, you can start to battle any negative mention of your client before they’re even spidered.

Those are my quick tips for the tightwad - and boy do they work wonders. For a more comprehensive guide which includes paid options visit Andy Beal’s take on Online Reputation Monitoring.

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I am a small fish in the Search Marketing Blogosphere, and I make no mistake about it. Let’s get that out of the way right now. SEM is a snowball, the Wild West, an unidentified organic lifeform frigging with colonists on LV-426 (nerd alert). One of the only ways to stay on the cutting edge of this strange new beast is to read a staggering amount of related blogs every day. It’s hard to get through them all, and taking a few days off leaves you with a backlog that makes it tough to try and put a dent in all the posts at all. My point is, I have to choose the personalities I spend my time with very carefully.

There are my trusted favorites, and my new fancies - all of whom have proven themselves to be sources of hard information and advice, and not just links to other people’s information and advice. Many SEO blogs point to other SEO blogs with little original content. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re looking for high-level industry happenings. But I have to concern myself with straight poopy poop dope, and little else. Practical tips and strategies that go into painful detail are what I need, and aren’t just general blabber about ’social media’ and how important it is right now. I have a housepet that could tell you that.

So as I make my bones as an SEM blogger, speaking largely at the moment into a vacuum, it’s time to decide what side of the road I want to stand on. I’d like to eventually be considered as some sort of twisted marketing resource, so my new SEO Tips category is thus born unto the Pony. I’m no knowledge hoarder, people. And with no further ado, here is the first:

The Yahoo! News RSS feed usually looks great when aggregated, as opposed to Google News which can look absolutely terrible. The Y! articles don’t usually double up from multiple sources, and the 100 word excerpts look like you painstakingly wrote them yourself. The best part is yet to come - the feeds are completely customizable. You can create an RSS feed, which is fully compatible with Squidoo, HubPages, Google Reader, BlogLines, etc. simply by typing in your desired keywords. Be sure to visit the feed customization page and bookmark it immediately (scroll down to get to the form). Here now are some practical applications:

• You can employ exact search criteria with quotes to pinpoint and filter content.
• Build a feed for your company or website name to monitor brand reputation around the web. Read it every morning.
• Use feeds on any number of social media sites where RSS is enabled for great updated content.
• Build Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, etc. about your company and filter in new Press Releases mentioning you automatically.
• Hook up easily locatable RSS feeds near the tops of your pages for easy syndication. This is a core best practice of social media marketing: make your original content easy to bookmark, vote, syndicate etc.

And, I’m spent. I sincerely hope that this - or some of my future battleground tips - set off a spark in your head that wasn’t there before you started reading. Although if you literally have sparks in your head, you probably have more important things to worry about.

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