ASM Development - taking websites beyond design

How An Article Directory Can Help With Reputation Management

Article directories have long been looked at as tools to garner inbound links and for delivering useful traffic. However, a side benefit may be its use to help with reputation management. The downside to the internet is that reputations can be damaged fairly easily and fairly quickly unless you have tools in place to help fight any negative.

Every business is going to receive a negative comment or two. There are times when some comments beyond the negative and become downright destructive. Former employees are classic examples where they can take ‘insider’ knowledge and use it to harm a business. There are also several websites around that pander to those who want to destroy a person or businesses reputation.

So how can articles help?  Generally speaking, if someone wants to do a search on a person or business they will use one of the search engines. There are typically ten results returned on each page. You may have several of those already claimed through profiles on social networking sites. That still leaves several gaps that  could be filled by negative comments (some of those sites designed for complaints rank quite highly).  If you do a general search on most topics, you will notice that articles will often fill some of the top search results.

Sites like EzineArticles rank quite highly so articles that have been submitted are also likely to rank highly. When submitting these articles, your resource box should use your name, your business’ name, or your brand name as the anchor text and should point back to your website.  If you can include any of these names in the title, for example, ‘How John Doe Caught A Salmon’ then it will gain a huge boost in the search results (BTW, the article doesn’t have to be business related, it can be on a sport or hobby – you are looking to rank for a name, not  a keyword).

Once accepted into the directory, bookmark the article in a couple of the popular bookmarking sites then watch it rise to fill one of the positions in the search results. Fill all ten places for your name, your business, and your brand, and it will help to negate any negative comments should they arise in the future. At the same time, it won’t do your online marketing any harm at all.