Online reputation management services can help to shape the success of customer’s online marketing campaigns, and the direction of their marketing campaigns in general. One article I recently read, over at SearchEngineWatch.com, one of the best websites for topics regarding online marketing, gave a great example about pizza.

I don’t get pizza often, but when I do, I find myself going with the familiar. I tend to get the same pizza from the same place. It’s simple, straightforward, and requires no thought or effort. And let’s face it, if I’m ordering pizza, I obviously don’t want to put in effort.

However, in a recent discussion with a colleague, we weighed the pros and cons of stepping out of our safe, normal, routines and trying something different. Only by trying something different could we find something new. I think he was talking about business or something, but I was hungry so that’s what I got out of our conversation. Try a new pizza place.

Now there’s this little pizza shop not too terribly far from my house that I drove by all the time but had never tried. Me, being the adventurous sort, decided that finding their phone number online and calling them really wasn’t that much effort so I did the deed and typed their name into Google and whammo — universal search result.

The number was right there on the SERP. I didn’t even need to visit their site, but I was intrigued and compelled to click on a link, right under their name, to two reviews. If I was going to try something new and it moved people enough to review it multiple times online, then I definitely wanted a glimpse of what was in store for me.

What was in store for the author was an odd review about patrons not having to be worried about being robbed. While the review was likely originally placed in the restaurant after a hold up or something in an attempt to help clients feel more safe. However, the author of the article points out that the review now just seems ludicrous and is likely to drive off, rather than bring in, customers.

http://searchenginewatch.com/3640929

LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, is a complex document indexing system that uses keywords, relationships, and other factors to provide users with a means to find relevant information. It is based on topical search as much as it is on keyword search so that if you search for a specific keyword such as “search engine” it would not only display semantically related results like “search engines” but related terms like “Google” or “meta search engine”. It’s the kind of system that is used in libraries and on the website Metaweb.

Metaweb is, if you will, a complex online reference library and it indexes data in the same latent semantic way. What’s more, it’s also now a part of the Google search stable that continues to expand. Google has purchase Metaweb in order to offer its users a continually updated and improved search experience so you should expect integration of Metaweb data into Google’s own data some time in the future. Considering Metaweb has details on over 11 million real world places, people, or objects the integration could take time but it is likely to come at some point.

SEOs and online marketers are constantly being presented with new and unique opportunities and obstacles that need to be overcome. Google has introduced some semantic results of its own. Local business listings, videos, news, blogs, and shopping results are some of these and compared to the opportunities that Metaweb presents they could be considered relatively simplistic in their indexing. Stay tuned to see what’s next.

When you ask seasoned veterans of the Google Reputation Management industry for advice on how to avoid being a victim of online defamation or libel, their number one reply is always to take preventative action–be proactive, rather than reactive. If you wait for something to happen, they say, it will. If you take the time to prevent online libel, it is less likely to happen and less likely to be effective–win, win.

Some of the most obvious ways that you can prevent any online libel from occurring is to purchase your domain name. For example, if your name is Alex Hernandez, you ought to consider purchasing AlexHernandez.com. Secondly, you ought to take all of the domain names and usernames for that name on messengers, like Yahoo or MSN, and on free blogging sites, like WordPress and Blogspot.