How Do You Counteract a Negative Online Presence?
You have worked very hard to create your website and/or blog, and you have probably spent a fair amount of time creating personas in the world of social media. You have built up some regular traffic, and you find the Internet is a friendly place after all. Then something unexpected happens… a negative comment on somebody else’s site.
Perhaps it’s a negative review on a business site such as Yelp or Google Business Directory. Or perhaps somebody doesn’t care for the way you’ve written a blog post, and they have expressed their dislike on their own blog. It could even be that you had one too many at a friend’s party, and that said friend has posted photos of you on Flickr.
Whatever the negative information is, what can you do about it now? Your online presence has been tarnished, and you need to polish it back up. In these cases it’s unfortunate that the nature of the Internet is to be a gigantic database for online activities. While you may convince your friend to take down the pictures, and you might negotiate with that unhappy client and get them to change their review, the fact is, once something is posted online, it’s likely to remain available through the Wayback Machine, Google cached records, or somebody other site’s catalog of online content.
SEO is your best defense
A targeted SEO campaign is your best counterattack when your online reputation has gone south. While you may not be able to erase the content, you can bury it in the search results by creating opposing content that will rank higher. This is done with a combination of content generation on your website as well as content aggregators such as Squidoo or EzineArticles.
Once you generate the opposing content, then you use link-building strategies to increase the page ranking to bring your content up in the search results, and bury the negative content you have found. At Landau Design we teach a Do-it-Yourself SEO class that assists you in creating an SEO strategy to bolster your online presence. Our next class begins July 14, 2010. Find out more >
How do you know if there are negative comments out there?
You should research your online presence every month. You should keep a log of what you find so you know when something new appears. We believe your online presence is your gold card on the Internet, and if it gets tarnished, it can harm your business. We have created a free PDF to show you how to research your online presence.
