In order to succeed and combat the competitive online world, you need to maintain a good reputation online. A good reputation not only builds confidence and grows sales, but ultimately leads to better revenues and higher profitability. In today’s Internet buzz nasty rumors, wrong opinions and incorrect news spread rapidly and if not taken timely action to handle the news properly, you may face a serious threat to your online business and credibility.
Here are some simple measures you can take to maintain your website’s reputation.
1. Respond to customers
Being open and responsive to customers is an important part of creating a positive impression and managing your website’s reputation. If someone asks you a question, answer it there or through e-mail. Be quick in addressing your customer issues before the word spreads.
2. Answer the negative comments humbly:
Be real, not everyone is satisfied with your work and services. If these people are among the ones spreading negative comments about you for whatever reason like delayed service or unfriendly attitude, answer them instantly to terminate the issue right there! Be very polite when putting your point of view in front of such people and you’ll sure succeed in saving your reputation. Answering negative remarks modestly can be a great way of turning a bad situation into positive one.
3. Create official online profiles
Create your own platform for users to share their experiences they’ve had with you. Create your own profiles and websites complete with the kind of information you actually want to be available about you. Let users communicate with each other and comment about your products or services, whether positive or negative.
4. Report stolen material from you
It’s very well possible that online competitors may steal material from your website to increase their ranking and traffic. This may lose your credibility among your users, making you “not-so-unique” in their eyes. To control such theft, you can report their site through strict action.
5. Write blogs
Writing blog posts are extremely effective in promoting your business. Through blog reviews and blog comments, you even increase your chance of getting high traffic volumes to your website. If you or any of the experts in your business have important knowledge like instructions, guidelines, tips and trick that can be useful for the users, share them through writing blog posts. This will greatly enhance your online reputation.
6. Optimize For Search Engines
Majority of the internet users accept results from Google searches or any other search engine as highly credible. Therefore, to maintain a good website reputation, don’t forget to optimize your website. You can consult professional search engine optimization services for this purpose.
7. Using the social media
Setting up social media networks in order to maintain your website’s online reputation is a great thought. To begin with, set up your profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do the following things:
- Create a complete profile by putting all the information
- Engage and Interact with the members
- Monitor comments for both positive and negative remarks
You’ve spent a lot of time building up your website’s good reputation, so it’s important not to let anyone drag it through the mud. Follow the above given tips to maintain your positive reputation among the online community.
35 comments ↓
Here are a couple more that I think are important.
1. Reliable web hosting. You don't want your site going down often, becoming unavailable to the customers. We get really frustrated with this sort of thing and will put you in a bad light.
2. Good security measures in place. It could be disastrous to have your site hacked. The hackers could put up nasty stuff on your site, or just keep it offline. Best not to neglect this aspect of your online presence.
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Nice article, I specifically like number three. I believe it is becoming more and more important to be a part of social media in today's business climate. We are telling our clients this every day and more and more of them are starting to understand why it's so important.
Thanks for the post.
Brian Porter
Bucca.com
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Curious how one goes about reporting copyright theft? We experience it regularly, but what can we really do about it?
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A Blog is an easy way to increase your credibility and keep the audience interested in tips and quick articles.
Good points. Stable hosting is really essential. I often come across sites prompting "server is not available" or even "server busy" while there is not such extra ordinary user interaction. Surely, better live time and accessibility of your website do matter a lot.
Thanks Crystite.
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Yes, social media interaction and having good identity over there is like a big hording telling your connections/friends/visitors etc about you!
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Well, I think we got least solutions for this. You can look at copyscape.com and some creative common licensing.
Even, now you can have some solutions to avoid harm of duplicated content from search engines using "canonical tag". If someone will publish your content than you wont lose your worth.
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i agree, i think its import to maintain credibility on the web
Alex you are right, these tips help to maintain your repute on the web.
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[...] 7 Tips to Maintain Your Website Reputation [...]
Thanks for these. It's always important to make sure that you maintain a good reputation on the web, I find the best way to do this is through blogging. Great tips.
Definitely blogging is a good way out. I find it being useful and not only it helps me to keep in touch with my clients but also to have some learning. So, there are good reasons for blogging and it is an essential tip for maintaining web reputation.
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Thanks for the info. How can online reputation help to generate traffic to the website .
[...] 7 Tips to Maintain Your Website Reputation [...]
[...] 7 Tips to Maintain Your Website Reputation [...]
If your website is well branded and having a reputation mark than surely everyone knows about your brand/website. There can be tremendous taps to drive you with lots of traffic.
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[...] 7 Tips to Maintain Your Website Reputation [...]
Thanks for this useful advice. The most difficult thing for me to do is answering the negative comments humbly, sometimes my emotion also plays in this problem, I can't think straight for while. I usually choose to do another activity before answer that negative comment, let my emotion calm down so my brain can think straight
Using social media also quite useful for me, I will continue to use it to promote my article. Thank you for the sharing
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It is quite true case with many of us. But it is also true that one need to be very cool and calm and let someone to say, though sometime it is quite tough to see such negative comments but if you keep your patience and take the things in a positive way than surely there will be some constructive platform. Sometimes, it happens that even in that negative comment you find a line of thought of some idea or some new paradigm to look into which you might have not cared about. So, it is your greatness that you reply such negative comments with a bold opinion. I appreciate you for being so cool and good
Yes, social media is quite beneficial these days along with blogging – a good way out to promotion indeed.
- J.
[...] How to Socialize Your Website [...]
[...] How to Socialize Your Website [...]
[...] How to Socialize Your Website [...]
Some great points here. Picking up on Crystite's additional points on Reliable web hosting and security. Boring subject I know but the basics are also needed to "Maintain Your Website Reputation". The average website is unavailable for 2 hours per month – see my post for facts and figures on outages and abandonment's: http://nickpoint.co.uk/2009/07/03/the-reality-of-... All your efforts on website reputation can be in vain if the site is slow or parts of it are down.
Website visitors are increasingly less tolerant of downtime. The effects are real. A Harris survey in 2008 found that consumers abandon or switch 42% of all transactions when they have a problem. This is up 12% on 2007. Also 84% of online consumers share negatives experience’s with others (Harris). Many of these problems are technical and performance related.
Many of these problems are technical and performance related. A reputation which took considerable effort to establish can vanish overnight. The downtime message spreads at the speed of light through Twitter across 10’s millions of users. You can become known for being unreliable.
There are a bunch of website performance and availability monitoring services out there, including ours (http://AwareMonitoring.com) which can help watch out for hosting, security issues and slowdowns.
[...] How to Socialize Your Website [...]
Hi Nick, if I conclude your points than it's all about your website being live and running all the time. Yes, it is true and one of the most crucial factor for building your website reputation.
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7 Tips to Maintain Your Website Reputation…
Here are some simple measures you can take to maintain your website’s reputation….
[...] 7 strumenti per mantenere una buona reputazione del tuo sito [...]
I think #1 & #2 are the most important. If you don't take care of your customers, they will find someone else who will. How you respond to critisism can make your break your business with future customers.
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it seems that every successful website these days that it is mandatory that they have a Facebook and Twitter account – more exposure though for sure.
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Hi Roberta, you are absolutely right to say about the clients. Taking care of the clients is the most essential part of getting your business live and reputed. Otherwise, there is not only business loss but also the honor of the business can be tempered one might have built in long time.
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Well, I have seen the social icons of Facebook and Twitter are being promoted on wide majority of websites either business or individuals website. But, I feel its not mandatory; however, it is good being socialized.
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Keep working ,great job!
Customer service is very important. Using social networking to improve the reach of your site is another good way. The more people know about your business, the more of them there will be to spread the good word about your company. No publicity is bad publicity as they say.
I think these points all lead to a general summary – which is – attend to your site and its customers. This is something that a lot of websites dont do, specially those who dont give it enough importance, and therefore 'dont have enough time'.
Nice article great job!