Defensive SEO

Bloggers can badly affect your online reputation and, once they get it into their heads that they can, they probably will. The web is still the Wild West in many ways, there's no effective law enforcement. So, to prevent yourself being targeted, what can you do? Defensive SEO is the answer.

If a blogger with a whole load of inbound links decides to say bad things about you or your company then chances are when someone does a search for you or your company directly online then the blogger's comments will show up in the search results higher than anything else. The first impression many people form of you will be negative.

The way to counteract this is by forcing any negative results down the search returns so that they won't be seen or if they are, they won't counteract the already established favourable impression. Defensive SEO is the practice of creating these results by favourably placing sound reviews and comments on yourself and your services in sites where they'll be indexed by the engines and highly returned in any search results.

Do you have a MySpace account? If you're asking yourself, Why on Earth would I want one?, the reason is because if you don't get one for your-company-name you may well find out that someone else has used it. They may very well not have your best interests at heart. How would you like to see racist or any kind of inflammatory comments in the public view at www.myspace.com/your-company-name? Or on any of the myriad other such social networking sites that are springing up?

The only answer is to take action now and engage in defensive SEO.