Surfing The Channel

Archive for November, 2010

If you understand the importance of online reputation but are at a loss as to where to start to protect your company’s online brand, you need to think in terms of search engine results. What pages currently come up in Google when you enter your company’s name in the search box? Which of those results are good, or at least neutral? How many are negative? The difference between the first and second figures it the number of new results you will need to generate in order to push the negative results down and out of sight.

Now you want to create new pages to show up in the results. Consider issuing press releases, creating a YouTube channel , or releasing podcasts, slideshows, and white papers or case studies. Blogs are a good option or you can create what are known as microsites for specific elements of your business. As an example, some companies will gather all of their company newsletters in one place or create a site like elixir interactive press releases with an archive of all their press releases. You will also want to create accounts and pages on social networking sites such as FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The next major step in online reputation management is getting those new pages ranked. Search Engine Optimization means that you take care in creating the titles, tags, and other on page elements for any new page. If they are properly SEO-ed, they will naturally rise higher in the search results than if they have no SEO. Next, getting other sites to link to the URLs will give them a stronger position in Google and make them more likely to withstand any attack. This last step can take a lot of work in publicizing and marketing new videos, profiles, and posts, but it is definitely worth the security it will provide if an attack does occur.