Website Reputation Management: You ARE What People Believe

Reputation Management Explained by Web Hosting Provider

In the 3-D world, reputation management is fairly simple. The store is pristine. The warehouse runs like a Swiss watch. You’re company sponsors community activities and even a sports team. In the real world, it’s easy to establish a quality reputation as a good corporate citizen within your service region.

Not so on the web. On the web, your reputation is determined by some of the same factors as 3-D, but, because information about your store, company or NFP is out there for all to see - web hosting provider explains. Additional considerations should be made to build a quality reputation FAST. On line, you are what people believe.

Your Website

You don’t need to spend a bucket of bucks to have a professional design your site. You can do it yourself using template-based software and, if part of what you’re selling is style and design, chances are you’ll design the perfect look for the image you want to project.

Things to keep in mind:

Navigation – simple, self-explanatory and consistent.

Content Architecture – Use informational content to create both need and solution. Keep this informational content separate from your site sales copy.

Accessibility – The more clicks it takes for a visitor to find the product, service or information s/he’s looking for, the fewer prospects will actually get through to the “Contact Us” page. You know, the one you want people to complete. Keep it simple. The best way to do this is to develop drop-down or fly-out sub-menus.

Transparency – Nobody likes to be scammed. No one likes to discover that they’ve “signed up” for a year-long, $169 course when they downloaded a free booklet, i.e. opted in.  Prices, S&H, return policy – everything the prospect needs to know should be right out there in the front. No tricks, gimmicks or bait-and-switch games.

Website Interaction – Site visitors enjoy interacting with a site. For example, a mortgage calculator on a realtor website provides ample opportunity to play with the numbers. On certain SEO blogs, you’ll find valuable free tools to develop some good metrics on your site.

Currency – If it’s yesterday’s news it’s old news. Keep your site green with a blog that generates threads (user-generated greenery), use RSS feeds to deliver the latest news in your site’s area of topicality and add new content yourself. You’re the expert. Don’t just sell products or services, sell what you know.

Search Engine Reputation

If you don’t think a bad reputation with search engines can hurt you, check the crash-and-burn wrecks that line the breakdown lane of the Information Superhighway. You can so easily get slammed, sanctioned and even banned from Google, Yahoo, Inktomi and other key search engines – without even trying.

Some suggestions.

Keep it clean. Search engine bots are more sophisticated than ever. They can easily detect invisible text, re-directs, paid in-bound links and other ‘tricks of the black arts’ – SEO. Don’t spend time trying to subvert a search engine. Instead, use the search engine ranking factors to improve traffic and PR.

Visit Google's Webmaster Central often to check your site’s analytics. Who’s stopping by, where did they come from, where did they go – this is the kind of information that’ll equip you to do some site tweaks to improve your site in the eyes of the next Googlebot.

Avoid using hosting providers that host garbage sites – porn sites, drug sites and other web trash. Go with a reputable web host and, yes, this is a question you should ask before you sign a 12-month hosting contract with no 30-day money back guarantee. You’re stuck.

Make your site search engine friendly by providing a site map and lots of embedded text links spiders can follow to index your entire site with pinpoint accuracy. All of this will take place below the site’s skin in the HTML code itself.

Encourage links swaps with sites that are related to the topicality of your site only! If possible, link with higher ranking, relevant sites. These top-performing sites pull your site up by its boot straps.

Avoid once-common practices such as keyword stuffing of site text or <keyword> HTML tags. There are a number of practices that, while not illegal (black hat), do fall into the gray hat category.

Go with a reputable host with a 99.9% uptime. The number one negative ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithm is inability to access site. That means either the server was down or the spider was unable to crawl pages that are tagged as indexable. It can take months to recover if a bot sidles by when your host server is blowing smoke out its CPU. How many months could your on-line business survive with that kind of punch to the mid-section?

Finally, you can fool a bot some of the time but you can’t fool all bots all of the time. If you employ gray hat tactics or black hat tactics, at some point you will be caught, you will be sanctioned (lose of hard-earned PR, e.g.) or banned from the search engine altogether. Oh yeah, real good for your digitally-based business. It’s death sentence, start over, do-not-pass-go-do-not-collect-$200 situation. Not worth it.

Client Reputation

There simply is no better salesperson for your business than a satisfied customer. Think about it. How much of your client or customer base found you through a referral from a trusted source? If you’re good at what you do or sell, more than 50% of your current business should either be repeat or referral clients.

It’s this simple. Happy clients will spread the good word. Unhappy clients will taint your site at every turn.

Some suggestions for keeping website visitors happy:

Provide accurate information in your HTML <description tag>. This is the information that appears on search engine result pages under the search engine link. Sell yourself a little.

Provide good, unbiased information about your products or expertise. This establishes trust, essential to client reputation management.

Post your terms where they can be accessed easily. You don’t have to lay it all out on the home page or other interior pages but there should be a tab that takes visitors to your statement of terms (SOT). No fine print. Everything – from delivery schedules to restocking fees in big type. That’s transparency.

Use Client Management software. This software tracks order status. More sophisticated programs warn of downstream problems so the site owner reacts quickly before the problem actually materializes.

Stay involved. Monitor projects and keep them on schedule. Do not be late or miss project milestones. This is like instant death.

Lose money. That’s right. Even if you lose money on a client or customer, that one individual can bad mouth you globally today. Check out Angieslist.com if you don’t believe it. You may lose some cash up front but, again, a happy client is your best salesperson – and they’re FREE. Sweet.

Employ the highest levels of security software and let your site visitors know that you respect their privacy and the security of their personal information. Trust-building is the foundation of a long business relationship.

Finally, under-promise; over deliver. Works every time.

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