The concept of protecting your brand via SEO is something I have talked about both here in the office with other developers and suggested in client meetings. However it occurred to me that I had never mentioned it here on the blog. Although it is impossible to keep your dirty laundry from ending up online, you can string up enough white linen to cover your assets.
The blogosphere doubles in size every 6 months. More and more people are gaining access to ranking blogs were they can throw out whatever content they want. This means that a jaded customer from last week just wrote a post about how your widgets are the lowest quality widgets online. Owning your brand online goes beyond having all the top ranks in the SERPS. Here are a few searches your website should come up for.
- Your name and all miss-spellings/variations.
- All employees names.
- All products specific to you (part of your brand).
- Any events, press releases or news stories about your company.
Because you own your domain name, it is fairly easy to do brand based SEO. All you need to do is produce lots of content for each of these terms. If you have a blog this is the easiest way. Hire a new employee? Write a blog post about it. Short and sweet with their name in the title. You have now branded them as an employee of your company. One thing to keep in mind is that you can’t remove a page from the web whenever you choose. The cache will still be there, so be careful.
Sub-domains are a great way to hang nice linen content on your search returns. Since sub-domains register as separate domains, Google will often return your main domain and a sub-domain below that for your brand searches. Duplicate this a couple times with quality content, and you have a good chance to dominate the results pages.
If you have a blog, another good way to take up some spaces with your content is with blog catalogs. All you have to do is point them at your feed and the quality ones should take up a few slots. If you are running out or personal resources, you can always ask some partners or affiliates to create pages about you on their site. If you link to those pages from your website, it should give it enough ranking to appear high. Not high enough to out rank you, but enough to drop a rogue trash talker.
The bottom line is that we can’t remove the information out there on the web. The only way we can try and control it is to be the largest contributor.
2 comments so far.
[...] pat wrote an interesting post today. Here’s a quick excerpt: [...]
I was searching really hard through search engines on some topics but finally i found it. Information provided here is really usefull. Thanks for such nice stuff! Toufique Ahmed