Good online reputation? Get ready for the bad times.

Yes, link building is a tedious task that must be done regularly and it requires a certain amount of imagination to get nice results. There are no advanced link building techniques in my opinion, there are only advanced strategies.

No more excuses, the fact that you have not spent some time thinking about it does not mean you cannot start taking some basic steps and the first one is to make sure that your reputation turns up as much as possible in certain search results.

Are we talking about online reputation and link building? Yes, keep on reading.

Protect your brand

Google the name of your company, your brand or your name. What for? I do actually rank first for my name! Sure, that was easy but what about the rest of the 10, 20 results? Is any of them ruining your reputation online?

If yes: You have a serious problem, contact a professional and don’t try stupid games that could get the situation worst.

If no: You are lucky but be ready because if it happens and you haven’t done your homework you will only have yourself to blame.

In any case the best, most simple and most overwhelming advice you can follow to keep your good name safe is “DON’T SUCK” as Avinash Kaushik, world wide recognized web analytics expert, says.

But everyone makes mistakes, so assume you will too. Nobody is perfect, after all, and even unintentional errors can be the origin of your bad reputation.

External content and link building

The idea is simple: try to cop the first results for your brand search as much as possible between the 15 ones with content you can control directly.

First of all, you need to create and spread content outside your web, for example:

• Social Media profiles: Twitter, Facebook, Google profile
• Professional profiles: Linkedin, job offers sites, About.us and similar ones
• Professional associations: local and national chambers of commerce sites
• Universal search: Images, videos, maps, news or whatever any other type of content search engines may include in their universal results.
• Freebies, giveaways or contests in microsites or relevant websites
• Sites were allocate presentations, guides or any other documents
• Press release distribution sites
• Any other you can think of

Second you need to create a net of links between them otherwise it could be a waste of time.

• Do not link ‘all to all’, try to distribute and balance the total amount of links and do not forget include your main site in this inter-linking
• Use your brand name in combination of a relevant keyword to play in favor of your organic search because, remember, all the sites talking about you are telling search engines what you do
• Inter-linking sites and tweeting about all of them will help search engines index all the related sites

Useful tips

Be careful with powerful sites like Wikipedia, a page about your company in sites with such a good reputation among search engines can outrank your own website.

Lack of ideas? Search for your competitors brands and take a look, where they allocate external content? Is there any interesting resource I didn’t know about?

Once you find a resource spend some time guessing how to make the best of it.

Do not copy and paste the same description of your company and services all along the Internet. Try to have different copywriting for every external page or site you have.

After all this work, I am completely safe?

To be honest, no you’re not. Once the fuse of a bad reputation is lit–given how attractive this kind of gossip is–there is no way to ensure one of those negative results is not going to popup on Google’s first results page, especially if it’s linked to by something like a forum.

In sum, the strategy here is having the pole position crowded with members of your team so when you have a situation they can more decidedly jump and outrank the bad guys in SERPs.