Link Building is Reputation Management

Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring the reputation of a person, brand, or company on the Internet. Everybody is online these days, looking for information about products and services. Therefore, managing your reputation online is extremely important in the business world. It’s often mistaken that online reputation management is something that happens after something negative has been written about your business in the online space. This isn’t true.

There are two different kinds of online reputation management: proactive and reactive. A proactive campaign is for businesses that are just beginning to grow or for those companies that want to maintain a good reputation. A reactive campaign is implemented when a company has encountered a problem and wants it “cleaned up”. A proactive reputation management strategy is just as important, if not more important, than a reactive one. A reputation management campaign should begin as soon as your business creates a presence online. It provides an opportunity to build a good reputation from the get-go and maintain that good reputation through the years.

Proactive reputation management is an image building campaign, which is essentially a search engine optimization link building campaign. Think about it. Not only is the content that you are putting out there via press releases, articles, blog posts and comments, and social networking helping to build quality links pointing back to your site, it’s also building your brand and creating awareness. It’s establishing your reputation online as a legitimate company that knows what they are talking about. It creates trust amongst your target audience.

As they say, “the best offense is a good defense”. Start building your good reputation online as soon as possible. Therefore, if something negative is said, it might not even be noticed since there is so much positive content already out there. Don’t wait until you start losing money to improve your reputation in the search engines. Without positive content, a bad image can form quickly. A negative reputation online loses money, customers, and slows or even stops the growth of a company. Don’t let it happen to you- start building your positive image today!
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Is SEO Immoral?

Is SEO immoral?

We search for relevance via the search engine. By learning and manipulating the system to accomplish its goal, SEO makes it more likely that you will come upon a target that is irrelevant. Thereby, wasting the user's time and resources. It could be considered advertising in the form of a search result.

Is this misleading and counter to the public welfare?

Normally, I'd just leave a response on the Q+A site itself, but in this case, I felt the topic warranted some broader coverage. Let's start by dissecting the points of the question, then tackle the overarching theme.

"By learning and manipulating the system to accomplish its goal, SEO makes it more likely that you will come upon a target that is irrelevant."

This statement strikes me as fundamentally untrue. SEO, like any form of influence humans can have on one another, can be used for good or evil. The great part about SEO, in particular, is that using it to promote irrelevant results is, generally speaking, a fool's errand. I'll illustrate why:

SEO is almost never applied to make non-relevant results rank for unrelated queries. And, I'd go one step further, arguing that if white hat SEO didn't exist, millions of search results would be far worse, as fewer high quality, relevant results would make their content accessible to search engines and well-targeted toward queries.

Complaining about SEO in this fashion seems akin to complaining about demographic profiling in brand advertising. It may irk you that when watching Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, clever advertisers have figured out that you enjoy the delicious, salty cheesiness of Cheetos® snacks* and thus, interrupt Jon's witty banter with pictures and sounds about their product. However, a world without ratings metrics, profiling and advertiser savvy would almost certainly show you far less tempting commercials.

The practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) attracts billions of investment dollars and massive amounts of marketers' energies to accomplish three key goals:

   1. Determine what people are searching for and create content that serves them well
   2. Make sites, pages and material accessible to search engines so they can display it when relevant searches are performed
   3. Improve the ranking of already accessible pages so they draw in greater quantities of visitors
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