Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

However, we’ve all made mistakes. Fortunately for most of us, the general public couldn’t care less what we think do or say, but anyone in the public eye had better get used to the fact that anything, absolutely anything that they’ve done or said that can be traced anywhere, may eventually resurface to cause them embarrassment–or worse–just when they least expect it.

No doubt though, that the accounts of Zuckerberg’s faux pas will pretty soon ‘disappear’ from the engines since he has friends, and is in a position to trade favors to make his bad publicity fade into oblivion.

The rest of us, if we’re unlucky enough to get caught out saying/doing something that reflects badly on us, either personally or in our capacity as a business, need to get really busy online to try and repair the damage.

Take steps to manage your online reputation!

The best way to do this is to flood the Internet (or your little patch of it) with as much positive material as possible. How you saved someone’s life, how you gave away half your worldly belongings in a good cause, how you are putting x-number of orphans through college…the list goes on and you are the best person to come up with ideas on what’s positive and good, that people would be interested to read about.

You can do this through your normal social media channels, and if you have friends who blog they can do a lot to push down those unwanted search results by blogging about you in a positive way, and linking to other positive articles/comments about you on other sites. Facebook itself can be a great help here, as can Twitter and all your Twitter friends.

Being nice to all you meet online and helping others out whenever you can will create good will that will help enormously if you are ever in need of some help with your reputation.

SEO for Competitive Analysis

Ever heard that you need a plan to get ahead? It’s sometimes exceedingly tricky to formulate a plan though isn’t it? Luckily, in online business it’s really easy to formulate a plan to get ahead in your niche–whatever that is.

Finding Your Niche Competition

First you need to identify those websites that are ahead of you in the search results for your chosen keywords. You can do this by doing a search on Google, Yahoo and Bing (and whatever other search engine you’re interested in) for the words and phrases you want to be searched for. Take a look at the top 10 results for each one. Check what other keywords/phrases these sites are using because you can often come up with some interesting new search terms you hadn’t thought of by doing this.

Comparative Analysis

Then you do a comparative analysis on each of the top three, and you’re away. You will have an itemized roadmap that will take you exactly where you want to go, and you will be able to implement it at your leisure-whenever you have a few minutes to spare.

Let’s take a closer look at the criteria:

1. Search terms (we’ve already covered that)
2. Title tags (what you see in the top, left-hand corner of your screen for each page). This is arguably the most important item of optimization. It dictates a large part of how the search engines see you. If you have fabulous content, but your title tags say ‘welcome to (your name)’ you will be sunk. Don’t miss the opportunity to put to or three of your major keywords in here, starting with the most important.
3. Your article/post title should also include at least one of your major keywords.
4. Look at the images your competition is using. Learn from this, and try to get bigger, more interesting images onto your pages, not forgetting that there is a balance: make the images too big and you’ll make your pages slow to load. Oh, and don’t forget the alt-text because this does matter for a number of reasons.
5. Make sure that your web content is far and away more readable, and more informative than that of the competition.

It will help if you arrange your results in a table for at-a-glance assessment.

Avoid putting all your eggs in one basket…

Don’t rely too heavily on a competitive analysis though. Nowadays off-page activity can have a major impact on your ultimate traffic and visibility results. Social media is a must. Don’t overlook Twitter, in particular, as a tool for networking, getting the word out, and even getting valuable links for your website.

I am dismayed at the number of Twitter users who are openly using my favorite networking implement as a spamming platform. They are seemingly unrepentant and unapologetic. They can’t possibly be profiting from it: I know I’m not alone that I will NEVER retweet a spam tweet. I will NEVER follow an obvious spammer.

There have been many blog posts recently about the events over at Twitter: How #FollowFriday has degenerated into a spam exercise.

I have noticed a steep decline in the general quality of new users following me, with tweets like:

Hello Please Check by Free Earnings report ! Make money online with me

and

Get start in online business – sell more products and get rich . Check my free raport about it

The problem is, these people are misguidedly under the impression that they are engaged in Social Media Marketing. They are nothing but spammers, pure and simple.

Social media marketing is all about building relationships and trust. It’s all about providing useful information and assistance to your network: in short it’s about making the Internet a better place to be–not creating a cyber-hell on earth.

For Heaven’s sake: Next time you go to tweet something that most of us will regard as spam, stop and think. Would you want to receive 100 tweets just like it? If not you probably need to stop tweeting, stop blogging and read. Read the blogs and tweets of people like Lee Odden, Darren Rowse, Andy Beal, and David Risley, to grab just a handful of good Twitter people off my timeline.

What can we all do to keep Twitter and the Internet spam-free? Don’t encourage spammers. Don’t follow them, don’t engage with them, and if they bother you, block them and tell your timelines why you’re blocking them. Be loud about it.

Blogging is a new industry, and while it is already huge, it seems the surface hasn’t really been scratched yet. Learning how to use blogging to enhance business might be something you’ll want to do in order to establish your online brand. One of the latest forms of blogging is micro-blogging, as in Twitter or Plurk.

There are lots of reasons why opening an account with Twitter is a great thing to do for your business:

1. Joining Twitter is free, easy and takes only seconds (OK you’re right, that’s two reasons right there).
2. You can create a Twitter network that links you up with some really impressive people in your niche. We even have celebrities like Britney Tweeting now. You can find best selling authors like Scott Allen and towering business personalities like Guy Kawasaki.
3. Twitter is one of the best ways there is to keep abreast of trends in your niche. Communication is essential for anyone wanting to succeed in this information age, and if that information can be had in real-time on a breaking news basis, just imagine what an edge that would give you compared to your competitors who have not yet discovered Twitter. Many times we hear important news before it breaks in print and broadcast media. There have even been instances where they’ve taken queues from us–not always successfully. Jill Whalen calls it the ‘water cooler aspect,’ and that about sums it up.
4. Even if you don’t feel like it now, grab your Twitter ID (especially your name) now in case you really regret it later when you see that everyone’s using Twitter, (chances are you will).
5. Twitter is a fantastic way of getting inspiration for your blog or website, or any other project you’re working on. Users often use it for feedback, canvassing the market and a lot more. Here’s just one example of how bloggers get material for posts as well as business development ideas.
6. Have questions about business? Give them up to the Twitter universe. Chances are you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.
7. Used correctly Twitter can be a superb reputation management tool both for getting the good word out and suppressing the bad. But that will only work if your Twitter network is already well established when you have a reputation crisis to contend with.
8. Some really interesting writers/artists are easy to link up with.
9. Itinerary coordination: Obama‘s presidential campaign made extensive use of social media channels including Twitter for announcements and coordination.
10. Twitter makes a very effective mode of communication and coordination if there’s a crisis, or heaven forbid, a disaster. But if you’re not already established on Twitter with an effective network, when a crisis erupts it’ll be too late.
11. If you choose to you can keep an eye on your market/network anonymously by signing up for Twitter in another name. You can have as many accounts as you want, and if you use an Twitter client like Twhirl, Spaz or Tweetr for Mac you can tweet in more than one profile at once.
12. You can Tweet from your PC, laptop, handheld or smartphone.
13. Twitter takes far less effort to keep up with than some other social media platforms, such as FaceBook, for example. You are in complete control of how much interaction you choose to take on.
14. All the coolest bloggers like Tech Crunch, Problogger, Copyblogger and lots more, are on Twitter. And before all my blogger-friends raise a howl of protest, I cannot list all you cool and notorious bloggers on here I want to finish some time today.
15. You can post your Twitterfeed to your blog or website to increase your network and provide enhanced interactivity for your clients/customers.
16. Join a multitude of entrepreneurs who are actively promoting their goods or services via Twitter in the form of special offers and so on.
17. There are a multitude of Twitter applications such as Twitter Grader, or Mr Tweet that will help you gauge your popularity, market reach and even shortcomings. All vital for social media marketing in any form.