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Loading ...The best time to build trust and fortify your reputation – your castle – is before the hoards attack, especially online. And they will. Oh yes, they will indeed. Online, the best defense is a good offense. The best offense is to make sure there is a powerful outreach to as many online resources as possible, be it through personalized email outreach that would introduce you, your products, or services.
One of the easiest offense is to start making sure you, your products, and your services become as close to ubiquitous online as possible. How? first and most important, you need to optimize the hell our of all your current online properties for search.
Do an SEO audit to see if your site has the sort of traction required to be as “big” and as attractive to search engines, such as Google, as possible. A site should be highly textual and also have a very clear architecture, and be both broad and deep.
By broad, I mean that each page should have unique meta keywords, descriptions, titles, and content with lots of textual internal and external links. Google indexes the Internet page-by-page and not site-by-site. Seriously. For real.
By deep, I mean that too many sites are still brochureware and only have 1-10 discrete pages: home, services, products, about us, contact us, who we are, what we do — that sort of thing.
People are too concerned with being brief and minimal with their corporate websites and I blame graphic designers for this. Sadly, pretty sites, sparse sites, minimal sites, graphical sites, and Flash-based sites aren’t attractive sites. The more keyword-dense and topically-focused pages, the better.
For search engines, blogs are the perfect storm: they are typically highly-textual, highly topical, link-centric, collaborative, and engaged; blogs are community-oriented instead of highly competitive and like-minded blogs tend to include one-another in their content through links and in general through link-lists and blogrolls.
A good offensive defense should be started immediately, well in advance of any crisis. Starting a corporate blog or making your corporate website more connected are simple ways; creating product-based microsites, each of which can feature one product or one service, can help as well. Work hard on dominating as many of the top-ten spots as possible. This dominance of Google will be simple when times are placid, and when a crisis occurs you will already be in a place from which to defend your reputation ; however, it will be a challenge nonetheless.
Most of our clients come to us without any sort of this. They, of course, own their number-one spot, because Google is smart like that; however, they are starting from zero when it comes to trying to dominate the top ten in a hostile environment.
Claiming the top ten spots in Google during a placid time when you’re not being attacked by libel, insult, and defamation is hard enough; getting a top ten spot placement, controlled by an enemy, removed is virtually impossible.
So, please consider taking the time to build up a strong offense as a powerful method for defending your online reputation.
Filed under: Defensive SEO, Protective SEO, Reputation Management, Search Engine Reputation Management, Search Engine Strategy, Search Engines, Search Reputation Management
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