So looking at this from the alternative point of view, how can you benefit?

Well firstly, it’s important to look at where the content farm style of websites went wrong. Quite clearly, one of the common signs is that they created not just thousands, but in many cases millions of pages containing low-quality content. All with the primary intention of generating search engine traffic.

That’s a big mistake to avoid, huge volume and low-quality is a clear sign of content which will no longer rank so easily in Google. But that doesn’t mean the search demand has gone, people are still searching for the same terms – so the potential traffic is still there.

If anything, it’s just got a whole lot less competitive, so many people will be benefiting from this update too.

Target The Long Tail

What I would recommend looking at is how you can target this for maximum benefit. In terms of scale: don’t try and target every keyword possible, that’s where the content farms went wrong.

Instead, keep your focus narrow – become a specialized authority within your industry or niche and instead of just churning out hundreds of articles, make sure you create quality content which adds value.

But when you do this, keep the long tail of search in mind – what is your target audience searching for? What are common questions they would ask or type into a search engine?

Do some research, look at the keywords which appear when you type “Why/How/What/Who [industry term]” into Google Instant:

(Interestingly, ehow.com is still number one for the above search – let’s see if that will remain true.)

As a first step, I would recommend you do some fresh keyword research, try using Google Trends, your favorite keyword tool and most importantly your analytics package.

Dig deep into your own traffic to find common terms or trends of searches. Examples of frequent searches are likely to be those such as why, how, when, who, what etc – but this may vary based on your audience and industry.

Once you have this information, you can start to put together a very useful list of keywords to base your content plan and strategy around. And following this, I would look to decide where these content ideas would be most suitable to publish, in many cases it’s most likely to be appropriate as blog content, but it depends on your site.

In other cases, it may involve re-writing, or extending, existing website content, or perhaps publishing common questions in an FAQ section may be a good option.

Whatever your content strategy is, there are a lot of keyword opportunities out there – and it’s something you should have been thinking of well before Google’s announcement, but it might be a good time to now revisit your content strategies and look at new ways to capture additional organic search engines visits.

What Does Google Consider High Quality Content?

One of the biggest problems with content farms is the fact that it’s low quality content – yes it’s unique,  so that’s a good start and that used to be a good enough reason to get top rankings when hosted on a strong domain. But moving forward, it’s going to take a bit more than that.

If you think about this from Google’s point of view, what do they look for to signal high quality content? The answer is pretty simple:  links.

If you’ve got content which has generated links directly to that page then it’s probably going to be far more likely to rank in the search engines now – not that links were a poor algorithm factor before, it’s just likely to have become even more important recently!

This means strong domains could struggle to just rely on average/poor content in order to generate search engine traffic. That means you have to create high quality content which can attract as much natural links, blog attention, social media bookmarks/shares etc as possible – signaling to Google that it’s worthy of ranking highly.

So while the algorithm change is bad news for those viewed as content-farms, it doesn’t have to be negative for everyone. It does open more opportunities with less competition for those who can provide true value in their content.

This is clearly the first step and sounds very obvious – but many people will be disappointed to discover that simply opening an account and tweeting their own content doesn’t miraculously fire their pages up the rankings! Your Twitter account cannot exist in isolation if it’s going to achieve anything – so you need to connect with relevant friends and industry peers.

That means doing more than posting links to your own website. You need to enter conversations, respond to questions and queries, talk to customers who mention your brand, and interact.

It’s a social platform, it only works if you use it socially. On top of that, if you want other people to retweet your content, you’ll have more success if you’re being followed by relevant people – so make the effort in building those relationships.

Use Twitter Tools To Help With Promotion

I don’t mean the automated follow/unfollow tools – but look for the type of tools and ideas which can help to leverage your profile.

Examples of tools which have worked very well are those such as Twtpoll or Paywithatweet, where you are naturally generating retweets and @ mentions by adding value to your followers.

Connect With Contacts From Other Social Media Sites

There are so many social media websites available that it’s almost impossible to keep up-to-date with the different sets of connections we all have. Obviously, these each have different types of target audiences and you’re unlikely to want to become Facebook friends with everyone you talk to on Twitter – but what about LinkedIn, Foursquare, FriendFeed, Quora etc?

In my experience, most people are happy to share the same/very similar contacts across different social sites, it’s just not always that easy in practice. There are two ways which I’ve found are effective at managing this:

1. Sometimes it’s just a simple job of importing LinkedIn contacts via Twitter, and then looking to export your other social media contacts into Gmail and importing from there.
2. If you want to dig a bit deeper, I find that tools such as Flowtown are a great way of grouping shared connections across social sites and then you can make sure you are connected with all of those key influencers in the same place.

By doing this, you are connecting with people who you already know from other sites, so they are likely to be valuable followers on Twitter who can help to connect with when building your profile.

Run Twitter Competitions

One potentially valuable way of leveraging Twitter to help your SEO efforts is to run retweet competitions. This is where people retweet a comment – usually including a link to your website, in the hopes of winning a prize you’re offering.

It can be an effective way to build a high number of links and increase followers, so many companies, including national newspapers, are leaping on the bandwagon. But this may not work for long. Google moves fast and it will be developing techniques to assess the value of tweets rather than something as simple as just the number.

So, make use of Twitter competitions for now, but don’t rely on this as a long-term strategy, because it probably isn’t.

Create Quality Content, Conversations Follow

This is the simplest rule for most SEO strategies, but it’s also one of the hardest to pull off. If you want people to retweet your content and enhance your importance in Google’s eyes, then create valuable articles and tools that will make them want to link to it and share it with their own followers.

While shortcuts like competitions will provide a quick boost, the best way to use Twitter for SEO is to fill your site with quality content, whether it’s blog posts, widgets, fantastic discount vouchers or whatever attraction you can create. Of course, that works in the wider web too. SEO shortcuts aren’t the answer, quality content is.

Posting quality content will also encourage people to follow you. Building high numbers of followers will enhance your authority in Google’s eyes, meaning, any links you post will carry more weight.

Also, have a look at the top stories featured on the homepage of Tweetmeme to get an idea of the type of content which generally performs well on Twitter in terms of getting shared – and ask yourself if your content is something that you would retweet if it was someone else’s work?

Use Your Targeted Keywords

Just as you optimise your own website with the keywords you want to rank for, make sure your Twitter account is also optimised this way to add context around your tweets.

Add keywords and phrases to your Twitter bio and use them (naturally, mind!) in your tweets. Without that, Google may not know how relevant your tweets and retweets are.

Make Your Tweets Retweetable

This is a very simple Twitter rule that gets completely missed by so many corporate accounts. Aim to leave enough space for people to retweet your comments and links, and to leave comments of their own.

There are only 140 characters to play with, so it’s not that easy – but it is essential.

Otherwise, you risk people cutting off the link in order to make their comments, or even deciding not to make the effort to edit it down and not retweeting at all. That’s not much use to you and your website’s SEO in the long run.

And we certainly weren’t disappointed. I thought it would be useful to share with Search Engine Land readers the top ten advanced search marketing tips which I gleaned from the show.

Link building: Offer a student discount. Among Kelvin Newman’s excellent 17 ways to build university and government links, the one I found most thought-provoking was for e-commerce sites to offer a student discount. This means that the generous offer instantly encourages university sites to link and may also generate further student blog and online coverage too.

Online reputation: Turn a negative into a positive. Mikkel deMib Svendsen talked about how if The New York Times has a negative article ranking in Google’s top 10 for your brand name, this can be very difficult to outrank. Instead of attempting to force this down with new listings, try looking for positive content on the same domain and building some links into this. The objective is to convince Google that the positive version is more valuable/relevant, so that this replaces the negative result with the positive article instead.

Keyword research: Use Mozenda to find new opportunities. A superb presentation from Distilled’s Sam Crocker saw a host of new keyword research ideas and tools being discussed. Most notably, Sam suggested using Mozenda to scrape Google suggest results and download this into a spreadsheet of keywords. This tip was clearly a winner with the audience!

Paid search: Use capitalization to erase poor quality score history Richard Fergie spotted that if you have a keyword with a poor PPC quality score, and still want to persevere with it, try creating the same keyword using different capitalization. Google currently allows you to insert multiple keywords in the AdWords interface for the same keyword (when using different cases), despite this not being case-sensitive when the query is made. So this could be a quick way of getting back on track, without that poor quality score keyword bringing down the whole account.

Google: Twitter links influence QDF and likely to impact organic search. Rand Fishkin shared experiences of seeing noticeable increases in “query deserves freshness” rankings, spotted following a link being retweeted several times on Twitter. He also spoke about Google and Microsoft’s data deals, which means that they have link information available from Twitter and Facebook and are likely to apply this to their algorithms for organic search in the future.

Redirects: Canonical now preferred by Google over 301′s. Rob Kerry could quite easily have had his own top 10 advanced tips just from day one. But what I found most interesting was that he’s noticed external domain 301 redirects appear to have been replaced by the cross-domain canonical tag, with external domain 301 redirects now having little or no impact since the tag was rolled out towards the end of last year.

SEO coding: Dot-net viewstate is probably hurting your site. SEO rockstar Svendsen took a look at how .NET viewstate code is so search engine unfriendly that when printed out it takes up 7 sheets of A4 paper, demonstrated in a very entertaining way by standing on the desk to show an example of this all taped together!

Facebook: Be creative with demographic targeting. Both Guy Levine and the very funny Aimclear double act (from Marty Weintraub and Merry Morud) gave some great presentations on Facebook advertising. The main message from this was that Facebook is currently a great avenue for demographic targeting and if you really think about age, sex, relationships status, location and personal interests, it’s normally not too difficult to find something you can sell to them.

Analytics: look for actionable data from reporting. Alex Cohen from Click Equations gave an thoughtful presentation demonstrating how the majority of web reports are largely pointless. Ranking reports for your top 10 keywords, which rarely change, don’t give you anywhere near the full picture—especially if your site has a large amount of long-tail traffic. What you really need is to tailor those reports around your goals and make sure that the reports contain actionable data. This means instead of just showing the same old stats to your clients each month, you can actually review progress for the things which matter most and are areas you are in control over, ensuring that you can aim to push forward.

Social media: How much can you save in customer service costs? Mel Carson raised an excellent point in the “Measuring the value of social media” session, asking “how much money does social media save you in customer service costs?.” If you can answer questions via a 140 character response in Twitter surely that is cheaper than paying someone to do customer support. Plus you can bulk-respond to customers much more easily using social media compared to answering multiple similar questions via phone or online support.

So those were my main takeaways. Overall I found this to be an excellent conference with lots of thought-provoking ideas from most speakers. If you have anything you’d like to add, please feel free to share your best tips in the comments.

You need to achieve this on a platform that is all about friends and family—people are not on Facebook to blog, to chat to strangers or to publicize themselves—they’re there to keep in touch. Tricky.

So, I thought I’d list five Facebook campaigns that have really interested me, by the different ways they have achieved support—or not, in the case of one of my examples.

Aleksandr Orlov – 605,602 fans

Even if that damn meerkat is starting to grate on you (and now he’s launched a soft toy and there are rumors of a Christmas single, get ready for him to begin grating!), his Facebook presence is genius.

His updates are written in exactly the way he talks: they’re sporadic and they’re really very funny. For example: “Today Jacuzzi have finally been fix by Sergei and plunger. Next time he enjoy bubbles I make him wear fur net.”

So why is he so successful on Facebook? Well, it’s partly down to the genius of the initial campaign—it’s really captured the public’s imagination.

However, since then, his success is down to a well-written online persona and Aleksandr’s distance from the brand he’s marketing. Because he isn’t closely associated with the official compare the Meerkat website, it’s okay to become a fan on Facebook—you don’t feel you’re aligning yourself with a commercial brand.

Armed Forces Day – 183,754 fans

Some types of organization can garner hundreds of thousands of fans without marketing brilliance simply by the value of what they stand for—and in the UK, Armed Forces Day is one of those.

With the nation desperate to find ways to support our troops while they fight overseas, there are thousands of online groups dedicated to showing our soldiers some support. The MoD simply relies on this outpouring of public enthusiasm.

So, if you’re a charity or worthwhile cause, your Facebook marketing will be easy as people willingly strive to associate with you. Social media will do you a lot of good for very little investment.

Dunkin’ Donuts—947,414 fans

Okay, hop over the pond to the US (at least for me anyway) and Dunkin’ Donuts is doin’ well on Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of fans are happy to associate themselves with a brand of cake.

How? How come DD has managed to entice so many people to tell their friends and family that they like to eat doughnuts?

Well, as far as I can see, the success of this brand on Facebook is all down to how it involves its fans. During the summer, it ran a campaign where Facebook users could post pictures of themselves on the fan wall with any Coolatta drink. Each day, one of these people would be randomly picked and win prizes.

Now, it invites fans to upload their pictures to its wall and once a week it picks a picture and uses it as the profile image. People like to be involved.

Directgov—11 fans

Now, I’m making an assumption that the Directgov fan page is the actual, official, UK government-endorsed Facebook presence of the public sector website.

So why is it not working? Why only eleven fans when Directgov is such an important, relevant and enormous brand. You’d think there’d be at least some Directgov employees willing to associate themselves.

What’s the reason for its failure then? Well, mainly the page has only been updated once (and that was with the campaign against drug driving where the teenagers all have Dobby the House Elf’s eyes). There has been no initial investment, which is a shame when Directgov normally does such a good job of marketing itself.

Wispa—800,138 fans

People really love Wispas and Cadbury knows how to make this work. Facebook has been an incredible marketing tool for the chocolate bar.

It was relaunced following a Facebook petition that was, apparently, genuinely a public response to the lack of Wispa in their lives. The press coverage alone was immense and Cadbury’s declared this was the first time “the power of the internet played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury brand.”

Now the brand is giving back—and helping itself to hundreds of thousands more fans. It has promised to give its advertising space to Facebook fans “as a thank you for all the love you’ve shown us.” It’s bought space on more than 1,000 billboards in the UK and Ireland and invited brand fans to submit messages to be put on them—you can read more at the dedicated Wispa Gold website.

That is very clever marketing.

How have you successfully marketed on Facebook? Do you have examples of what doesn’t work? Please share your ideas in the comments below.

Dell Homepage with Google SideWiki – Image credit: Flickr

I think the best description I’ve seen to date was on Econsultancy, describing it as “a way to graffitti websites.”

How can we web marketers respond? Have we lost control of our own websites and those of our clients? There have already been several instances of rude, insulting comments being left on the pages of major corporations.

So how can we make the best of Sidewiki? Here are my thoughts, and I welcome your comments. Haven’t yet seen Sidewiki? You’ll need to install the Google Toolbar and enable Sidewiki to do all of the things I describe below.

Leave a page owner comment

Sidewiki allows brands to leave special Sidewiki entries on their own pages, entries that are distinguished by a green background.

These entries rank above comments made by other users. They are another way of engaging with your audience via a platform they have chosen and can be really useful.

You could leave some general information about your organization, leave contact details for your customer services department, encourage people to visit your forum or blog, even include some comedic lesser-known facts about your business.

Anything you do engages with readers and shows you aren’t afraid of the power of Sidewiki.

Why not regularly update your Sidewiki with new information, links to press releases, podcasts, blog posts and so on. View it as a chance to speak to your visitors in a whole new way, rather than open season on your site.

Know your rights

Of course, having said that, you do have rights and Google has to recognize them. It would be unfair and illegal to introduce a tool that allows competitors to spam your pages or trolls to leave slanderous comments dotted about your website.

There are some raised eyebrows over whether Sidewiki is even legal and Google has to show some concern over spammers, flamers and so on. It has a ban process that allows people to complain about content.

For example, one of the first Sidewiki comments I saw was on the Daily Mail website. It berated the content and linked to the Guardian.

Now it’s gone and there’s a message from another user that explains: “I reported your post, using ‘other’ as the reason and explained you were simply redirecting traffic to competition.”

While I enjoyed the original description of the site, it is good to know that there’s a simple procedure for complaining about posts.

Don’t be afraid to use this facility in the face of spamming, slander and redirecting.

Be helpful

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice? Google has said repeatedly that the purpose of Sidewiki is to allow people to “contribute helpful information next to any webpage.”

Its vision, it says, is for a tool that allows people to share useful information and insight. Perhaps doctors can leave informative comments on websites advertising treatments, maybe finance experts can proffer guidance on how competitive a credit card is next to the page advertising it.

While people will try to exploit Sidewiki, others will use it to be helpful and social—just like Twitter, Sphinn or any of the other social tools we’ve seen.

So be helpful. Leave useful comments (not advertising) across industry pages and make sure people know where you’re from. Sidewiki could be yet another way to enhance your online industry profile, which can only help your business.

Offer alternative feedback options

Inevitably, at some point someone will be less than happy with your service. Make sure you give customers plenty of ways to offer feedback to you that aren’t Sidewiki.

Ensure you leave contact information on your site, don’t block blog comments, add a feedback form… Do everything you can to ensure people bring their complaints to you rather than scribbling them on the sides of your web pages.

Of course, you then need to take action to make your client happier with your business—otherwise, frankly, they have every right to leave comments for others to see.

Respond to negative criticism

I hope Sidewiki doesn’t just descend into a maelstrom of abuse and criticism, but it’s sensible to plan for dealing with any negativity. You should treat positive and useful comment as a bonus. However, it’s really important for any business to respond to negative criticism. Do you search Twitter for mentions of your company? Do you respond when those mentions are negative and try to resolve them? Then you’re a fine example of a company that listens and acts, which people respect.

Do the same with Sidewiki. If there are legitimate complaints about your product or service then address them. Your business will improve and customers will know you care.

Want to learn more about how Sidewiki works and how to use it effectively? See Danny Sullivan’s Google Sidewiki Allows Anyone To Comment About Any Site.

However, while this means press releases can be extraordinarily useful, it also means the world is utterly swamped with them and it can be hard for them to rise above the general clamor. That’s true despite the huge number of sector-specific online magazines and news sources that include press releases in their offerings.

If a company succeeds with a sound online press release strategy, though, it can enjoy free publicity, a reputation as an authority within its industry and potentially a wealth of inbound links to its website.

So, how can businesses ensure their press releases have the best chance of being seen? Here are a few hints and tips. Many of these are also relevant to corporate blogs, so keep an eye out for tactics you can use for social media campaigns.

Pick a point

Make sure your press releases have a story, a point and—ideally—an obvious news angle.

Try to make your news as relevant as possible to the general public as well, as this increases the chance it will be picked up by multiple journalists or news sources. For example, if you want to report that your business’ turnover has increased by X amount then try to fit this in with information about the current economic climate.

For example, writing that “online sock selling defies recession” is more compelling and potentially newsworthy than “LetsTalkAboutSocksBaby.com sells 70 pairs in a day.”

Look for the news point that would interest you if the press release was not about your own company and you stand a much greater chance of success.

Release responses

An increasing number of firms are sending out general opinion pieces as press releases, but I do not think this is useful—after all, that is what your blog is for. That does not mean your company cannot publish press release reactions to wider industry news, for example: “Our company commends Google’s decision to…”

Releasing responses like this works really well for the personal finance sector and yet does not seem to have spread elsewhere.

If a busy journalist is writing about the news and needs a quote from an industry insider, if yours is already in their inbox, using it will be easier than phoning around trying to find someone else’s.

Target your distribution

There are tons of press release distribution sites and they can be good places to simply get your content out there.

However, getting a journalist to take interest in the story and write about it is far more useful and will add considerable credibility to your efforts. With all the industry-specific websites out there—everything from Building.co.uk to sites like NetMoms&Mdash;there is likely to be a niche or topic-specific site which is an ideal fit for targeting your release. So make sure you use the online PR distribution industry specific categories and location options to help ensure your press releases reaches a relevant, targeted audience.

The effort put into finding a newsworthy angle and fully preparing a press release to create something worth discussing is vital for a truly successful promotion. With a few minutes research and a couple of friendly emails you have a much greater chance of seeing your story do well.

Don’t forget bloggers—targeting a few key figures could be a useful way of spreading the reach of your release. Also, links from really niche websites and blogs will strengthen your site’s industry relevance and drive up your rankings.

Follow up

It is a tough time for journalists, and the majority are working to incredible deadlines and managing enormous work loads. They are busy, so realize your release may not have even been read once it landed in journalists’ inboxes.

After sending a press release, wait a few hours and then follow it up with a friendly phone call. Did they receive it? Do they anticipate writing about it? Can you help them with anything?

Ideally, you want to make writers think they are being offered something that no one else is. A great hook is to offer them the chance of some unique quotes from the CEO or a few minutes chatting to the client you’ve highlighted in your release.

Don’t risk your credibility

Since the web became awash with press releases, quality standards have taken a hit. It’s crucial to impress the reader and protect your firm’s reputation by ensuring the quality of the release is high. This will make it seem more credible and make it more likely to be published.

Make sure your spelling and grammar are flawless. Where a typo in a blog post is regrettable but understandable, an error in a release is horrible.

Ensure your quotations are succinct, punchy and intelligent—these are often the only bits that will make it into a news story.

Devote some time to detail

All releases need certain key points of information, regardless of the subject of the release. These key points include a name and number to call for more details, the address of the company, a brief description of the firm (and of the client if your release is about another organization too).

The more information you hand a journalist on a plate, the more likely the poor, overworked hack is to use your release. If they have to look around the web to find a description of your company, they may choose not to bother.

Optimize your links

Undoubtedly one of the main reasons firms distribute press releases is to build up inbound links to their webpages. Many sites will just republish the release on their pages.

So, if you link to your pages in the release, you’ll increase the number of links to your site, which is good for SEO. What is great for SEO is relevant wording, so use your chosen keywords as the hyperlinked anchor text where possible. That reiterates to the search engines that your pages are relevant and authoritative sources for information on those keywords.

Many people recognize that a personal online brand could be as important (possibly more so) than a company brand when looking to win a new client, get a conference speaking pitch approved or be asked for expert opinions from the media. Online reputation management has also become a very important aspect of recruiting.

When investigating a person, the first place most people will go is Google. Rather than having a results page full of information about your unrelated namesakes, or neutral—or even worse, negative—listings about yourself, why not try to portray yourself in a positive light?

It’s not as difficult as you might think to influence Google search results for your own name, although the task will be far more difficult for some than others. If you are an SEO named Barack Obama then I’d recommend changing your name!

There are clearly certain types of results that professionals want to appear for a vanity search. It’s obviously great if you can control as many of the top ten listings as possible, and ideally you want this to consist of company profile pages, media mentions and so on.

Below, some examples of how you can use social media to help ensure ranking as highly as possible in Google for your “personal brand.”

Image credit: Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth

Blogging. Blogging is an excellent method of building a strong reputation within an industry. If hundreds or even thousands of people are subscribing to read your content and expert opinions, then this is clearly something you want searchers to find when they come looking for you online.

Most blogs are likely to be hosted on either a company or personal domain and the natural links generated should help to ensure this has a strong reputation in the search engines.

Quick tip: Make sure you have an author profile page which is linked to from each of your posts as this helps to build the strength and relevancy of your profile page to increase search rankings for queries on your name. It also means that users will find a useful landing page, displaying an overview of latest posts and articles.

Guest blogging. If you work hard on your own blog and keep it fresh with useful content, you can normally expect to rank for two of the top ten listings in Google at best. However, in addition to this you may have opportunities to guest blog at similar related websites.

There are many advantages (and disadvantages) to consider when guest blogging, but in many cases you can reach a wider audience of readers and enhancing your online reputation by adding another valuable source of content into your listings for a Google vanity search.

Quick tip: Offer to write guest posts for some of the top blogs which you admire within your industry but also make yourself available for interviews or blogger profiles.

Twitter. Similar to blogging, Twitter is an excellent method of building a strong online reputation within an industry. If you can build a following of relevant users by providing valuable tweets, you’ll probably find that your profile page will be highly regarded in the search engines too.

If potential clients are looking for more information about you, then a Twitter profile containing expert advice and related conversations is going to help strengthen your reputation in the eyes of the searcher.

Quick tip: Interact within the community by adding value to online conversations and building a trusted profile. This may require a large amount of effort but it’s very easy to spot a disinterested user and building a well-connected profile can prove to be a very powerful networking tool, plus it acts as a great landing page for users visiting via the search engines.

Business social media networking. Many people have profiles on business networking sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo. These are great sites to show a professional profile containing your career history to browsing users, letting them know straight away the company you are currently working for, if people are looking to contact or reconnect with you.

Quick tip: LinkedIn profiles are reasonably easy to optimize, make full use of the editable URL’s, make a large amount of your profile public visible (so that this is cached by search engines.) Whenever possible, try to promote your business profiles by linking to them directly from sites where this is relevant.

Online presentations. If you’ve spoken at a conference, seminar or workshop, upload your presentation to SlideShare and Scribd. This will allow people to view and download your presentations, plus it’s another chance to optimize for your name (or company name) and show that you are a highly respected speaker.

Quick tip: Optimize your profile by editing your details and strengthen the number of internal links to your profile page by connecting with relevant users.

Online video. Similar to online presentations, if you have any video recordings of conference or seminar speaking events then upload the ones you find appropriate to online video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.

If someone is searching for more information about you and can find an online video presentation, this could go a long way towards enhancing your reputation to the searcher.

Quick tip: Try using a headline in the style of [Presentation Name by "Author Name"]. this will be used as the title tag and on-page heading and will help to optimize for your name as important keywords.

Social media networking. Once you have targeted the main positive listings you want to appear in the search engines, why not try controlling even more real estate with some more neutral listings? The obvious ones are profile pages on sites such as Facebook (grab that vanity URL!), Flickr, Digg and StumbleUpon.

Quick tip: Try to actively contribute in niche social media communities (such as Sphinn for the search industry), showing that you are keeping up-to-date with latest news and trends.

So there you have it: follow these tips and you should be dominating a Google query for your personal in next to no time!