The SEMMYs, an annual online award event in the SEO industry, nominates posts for recognition on a variety of topics. We’re proud to announce that this year one of our posts has been nominated as a SEMMY finalist in the category of reputation management. Our readers may remember reading the extensive and thorough post "Be Proactive With Your Reputation Management" (posted September 18th) now nominated for the award. We discuss the importance of being proactive with your online reputation management, and give you 16 opportunities to dominate the search engine rankings for your business name.

As a SEMMY finalist our readers, friends, family, and connections are able to vote for our post to win the prestigious award. Voting closes this Friday, and we’d be thrilled if you took a few moments to vote: here. Feel free to pass on the word and help us win by telling your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail. We’ve made it easy, just copy and paste: VM made the 2010 SEMMY Awards Finalist list in category: Reputation Management!!! http://bit.ly/SEMMYFinalist Vote 2day!

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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Because of its widespread use today, Search Engine Optimization is much less of a mystery than it used to be. If someone was especially interested in gaining rankings for their site, enough information exists on the internet to instruct them in such an endeavor with relative ease. For example, a recent article by Jeffrey Smith on SiteProNews covers all the basics of link building – the single most important aspect of making any lasting gains in search engine rankings.

Without dictating exactly how to accomplish the sometimes formidable task of getting relevant backlinks to one’s site, Jeffrey does a very good job of showing how much of a difference each piece of the linking puzzle makes. The anchor text of each link is given special attention because of its enormous power in getting sites ranked for the keywords they want. Additionally, he goes over some of the factors inside each site that can help or hurt their rankings. Ultimately this article shows very clearly that SEO is mainly about maintaining consistent quality inbound links, along with regular internal website maintenance to keep the overall niche that a site serves coherent and relevant. With all these efforts in place, higher search engine rankings will naturally follow for any valid site.

[tags] search engine optimization, search engine rankings, backlinks, link building, higher search rankings [/tags]