Protecting Corporate Identity On The Search Engines
By Dave Davies, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning
Companies go to great lengths to establish their corporate identity
through marketing, advertisements, promotions, search engine positioning,
and other means. As with any success, it may well happen that criticism
follows. Any company is likely to do something that someone somewhere
won’t like.
As we all witnessed with the “miserable
failure” rankings on Google, if you are successful others
will attempt to discredit you. In the past these attacks have been
restricted to traditional media formats with a limited audience.
Now however with some technical know-how and a computer your company
or corporate identity can be attacked from anyone for the whole
world to see.
While a wide spread attack such as the “miserable failure”
incident is very rare, it is not uncommon for unsatisfied clients
to post negative feedback on you in forums or on their websites
and these posts may appear in the top search engine positions for
your company name. So what can you do about it?
The Goal
The goal is to monopolize the top ten or preferably twenty rankings
with information that you desire to have potential clients, reviewers
and/or the general public read. There are two main reasons for this:
- If your company has unsatisfied past clients, employees or
others posting negative information that shows up in the top results
when searchers look up your company name, this is bound to have
a negative impact on your ability to convert these searchers into
clients.
- Even without negative information out there it is in your best
interest to insure that good information comes up when people
search your company name.
It is possible to secure top positioning for your company name
without spamming the search engines. Doing so requires a significant
investment of time, however the payoff can be dramatic. So where
do you start?
Articles
Arguably, one of the single most effective means of accomplishing
this task it to write good articles about your industry and publish
them online to various authority sites. Articles written by your
company are excellent advertisements and prove that you know what
you’re talking about. If a potential client is doing their
research into you and finds an article written by your staff on
a credible authority website you will have won extra points.
For example, an article on search engine positioning written by
Acme Search Engine Positioning and published on a Webmaster authority
site such as SitePoint stands a very good chance of ranking highly
for our company name. To further the chances it is good to, if possible,
slip your company name into the article a few times. Beware however,
if you make you’re article a blatant advertisement many sites
will simply refuse to publish it.
Finding a list of authority sites in your field can be a daunting
task unto itself. I would recommend looking at what your main target
audience is and what your primary keywords are and start there.
For example, when looking into places to submit articles for Acme
I would search for the following phrases (and a bunch more as well):
- seo articles submit
- search engine positioning articles submit
- search engine optimization articles submit
- business articles submit
- internet marketing articles submit
- and a number of others.
You’ll notice that not all of them are directly SEO related.
Since you’re investing the time to publish articles it’s
a good idea to get them as widely distributed as possible. The more
work you put in now the better your efforts will show results. The
majority of the time spend writing articles will be spent in the
actual writing process. Once you have your list of places to submit
your articles to it becomes much easier down the road.
The Next Step:
Immediately after writing your articles I recommend setting up
a Google
WebAlert. You might as well sign up for an account that you
can manage as you have a few of them to sign up for now and many
more to come.
Create a WebAlert for your article title in quotes (i.e. “my
article title”) and also for an 8 or 9 word phrase taken from
the middle of your content (again in quotes). This serves two purposes.
First, you will be made aware of where your articles have been picked
up and actually published (submitting them does not guarantee publication)
and secondly, this practice will also protect you from copyright
infringements. If someone, somewhere steals your article you will
receive an alert. I recommend checking every alert you get (which
can be quite a few if you’ve done a good job finding places
to publish your articles). Make sure that your company is credited,
that a link to your site is present, and make sure it’s not
being taken by someone else and credited to them. You would be surprised
how often I’ve found this to occur.
These alerts will also let you know when Google has found your
article so you’ll now when you can expect to see it showing
up in the results and also when your site can begin seeing traffic
and backlink credit for it.
Advertisements
Purchasing advertising on authority sites can also be an effective
way to attain an additional ranking for your company name. Some
sites will actually place a page on their website about your company
for a monthly fee (it may not even be advertised but if you ask
most companies are happy to accept your money). If you can get this
page linked to from the homepage and write a full page about your
company, complete with links to your website, you will get the benefit
of the links, the benefit of the traffic directly from that site,
and also stand a very good chance of finding that page showing up
in the top rankings for your company name.
Smaller ads can be effective if done right. If you purchase a small
text add that has your company name in it a few times and is high
up on the page you may rank well for your company name though it
is difficult due to the limited number of words available for you
to play with.
Press Releases
Does your company have something great coming up? Has someone there
won an industry award or have you just completed a major project?
Then send out a press release.
A company we’ve been working with for a couple years has
done just that (for other PR reasons) but has discovered that their
releases have plugged up much of the top ten for their product (not
company) name. A very effective tactic from an ROI perspective.
There are many resources for publishing press releases including
doing it yourself. One resource I’ve found to be useful is
PRWeb if you
decide to go this route. The cost is relatively low and they can
distribute to over 100,000 contacts.
Additional Considerations
Georgia, an editor for SitePoint brought up some excellent points
in regards to this article inspiring this “Additional Considerations”
section. In an email she asked the following:
- It is really that easy? It sounds like all the reader has to
do is write articles and have them published on industry (i.e.
related) sites, place a few ads and send out a few press releases.
It might be an idea to "qualify" this approach by stating
exactly how many article publications you're talking about, and/or
how to choose a the sites on which you'd publish these and/or
buy advertising from. I presume that, for this technique to work,
the sites from which you published links (of any kind -- ad or
article) to your site would need to have a reasonably high search
ranking themselves -- is that right? Is there a numerical indicator
(e.g. target only sites with a PR of X or who appear on the first
X page/s of rankings, etc.) that readers can use as a rule of
thumb? I assume also that the links themselves would need to be
keyword-rich..?
- I'd also expect that the technique only really works if your
site was already in the top spot for (a) given search term/s.
If your site appears on page 3 of the search rankings, and an
ex-employee publishes something that appears at number 1 for that
search term, will the technique still work? Or will it only bump
you up relatively in the search rankings (I would not expect it
would necessarily put you at the top result). I guess what I'm
really asking here is: does all your other SEO have to be perfect
(and working) before this technique will have the desired effect?
These are examples of a point noted above that articles should
be proof read, in this case not just for grammar and spelling but
also for content and to predict additional questions your readers
might have. Don’t count on always getting en editor as thorough
as Georgia however. Generally speaking you’re going to have
to rely on yourself and those around you.
Now, to address these points:
- Is it really that easy? Sort of. While following the
steps outlined above will accomplish the desired results it is
not “easy”. Simply finding lists of quality resources
that will post your articles can be quite a significant task indeed.
Plan on taking hours on this step alone. Then there’s the
writing and publishing and the waiting for the search engines
to pick it up, the monitoring of the results on the search engines,
and then back to step one again with your next publication.
For this technique to be most effective the sites will have to
be well regarded (though not necessarily well ranked) on the search
engines. A business site posting articles on SEO may very well
rank in the top 10 for the company name of one of it’s authors
despite the fact that the site itself does not rank for anything
related to the author’s industry terms. Provided that the
site is well regarded by the search engines it’s a great
place to submit.
On Google, PageRank can be used as a decent indicator of being
highly regarded, however when you’re targeting the “Big
Three” (Google, Yahoo & MSN) PageRank should not be
the only consideration. Make sure that when you’re looking
for sites to submit to that you search on all the top engines
to insure you’re finding sites that are liked by all the
engines you want to rank on. This same rule applies when looking
for advertising positions.
How many articles? Unfortunately there is no solid answer
here. This will depend on the quality of site you’re submitting
to, how many sites you’re submitting to, and how well worded
your articles are. You will simply have to monitor the rankings
on a weekly basis (at minimum) and, if possible, publish an article
at least once a week until the goal is attained.
- Only if you hold a top position? No. What we’re
considering here is ranking for your company name, not some generic
and thus more highly competitive phrase. Chances are you’re
site is already ranking well for your company name. At least 90%
of all the pre-developed sites I’ve worked on have this
attained without any solid SEO in place. For the other 10%, the
inbound links from these article, press releases, and ads should
certainly put you over-the-top for at least this phrase. The true
benefit here is in the quality of the sites that are now including
your company name (hopefully at least a few times) on their page.
These are highly regarded sites and thus are spidered often and
given extra weight due to their established positions as resources
and/or authorities.
What we have to consider is the weight on the incoming links (high),
the weight of the pages that now contain your company name (high),
and compare that with the weight of the site we are trying to
push out of the top positions. If this truly is simply a disgruntled
employee, client, or some other such source, then chances are
they are not putting in the amount of effort that you are willing
to in securing your name, nor do they have the resources available.
Does all your existing optimization have to be perfect for
this to work? No. In fact, for those starting a company with
a new website this is a great tactic for insuring that people searching
for your company name encounter information that you’ve created.
You’re site may not rank #1 while it’s still at PageRank
0 with no backlinks recorded but a well-worded article on a PageRank
7 website stands a very good chance.
Final Notes
If protecting your corporate identity is important to you or even
if you just want to make sure that people searching for your company
online find your own website and also find the information you want
them to find then these steps will help get you there. It’ll
take time and effort but the rewards will pay off and, as an added
bonus, all these links to your own site from the articles, press
releases, and ads will certainly help your rankings for other phrases
as well.
I mentioned WebAlerts above. An additional good practice is to
create an alert for your company name (again, in quotes). This way
you’ll receive notification when anything about your company
gets published on the net. Information is power and in this case
it’s the power to influence what others see and learn about
your company.
And in some cases, that can be the power to win or lose your biggest
client.
If you have any questions about content creation or your website
in general please feel free to contact
us for additional information or sign up for our free search
engine positioning review.
Important Note: While the vast majority of our
articles are open for publication on other websites this article
has been written exclusively for SitePoint. any duplication in whole
or in part of this article without prior written consent is strictly
prohibited.
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