Being Web Savvy

Ever had a bad experience with a company? I know I have. And I wanted to tell the whole world just how bad my experience was. In the past, I would tell my friends and family about the company and suggest they find another company to deal with. When I had my last apartment I had a list in my address book of companies that had cheated friends and co-workers and a list of companies that came highly recommended by those same friends and co-workers.

With blogs, anyone can instantly tell hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of strangers about their unhappy experience. That single blog entry has the potential to lead to lost revenue for the company being discussed and hurt that company where it matters most. If you think about it, isn’t that really the intent of telling others that a company should be avoided?

A clever marketing or business owner might find that blog entry, work with the blogger to resolve the issues and turn an unhappy customer into one of their happiest. That blog entry suddenly becomes a real-life example of how well the company deals with problems and how they fix them.

Or, the company being discussed could simply hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit looking for reimbursement for lost revenues and even ask for punitive damages. The blogger might feel they are simply relating a factual accounting of their experience and stating an opinion. Free speech and all that. Right? Maybe not.

In my last post, I talked about actively reacting to what other people are saying about our businesses and websites. Actively Reacting As A Marketing Strategy can be a time consuming task but there is one great way to make the task much easier.

In order to actively react to blog entries, forum posts and other conversations that relate to your website or business you first have to find those conversations. For small websites and businesses, it might be as easy as conducting a few Google searches for their company name. But, there’s an even better way to find out who’s talking about your site(s) and go directly to the page where the conversation is taking place.

Many of us spend a great deal of time seeking ways to advertise our websites and businesses to stand out from the crowd.

How much time is spent actively reacting to what others are saying about us?

Some time ago I was subcontracted to do some marketing research for a company. Their products sold in the $100k+ range and they wanted to know what their primary competitor was doing online. The results surprised me and are something we could all learn from…

I don’t know about you but it’s always exciting when someone new visits my blog and joins the conversation by leaving a comment on one of my posts. It is a tangible way of knowing someone out there actually thought enough of the post to add their own. Of course, not all blog comments are made to simply join in on the conversation.

Sure, we all do it; leave comments in hope of gaining links for our sites and to get that blog’s author and readers to visit our sites. When those comments are laced with X-rated filth or simply a laundry list of links, most blog owners simply delete them. Some comments are clearly a one-sized fits all bit of meaninglessness that usually adds no value to the conversation. For example, the genius who left a comment on a post about link building like “link building is always a good strategy.” Those inspired comments also get the boot.

But, I recently came across a much more savvy spammer - the one who leaves a fairly decent to great comment but drops a link to a site that is far from being family friendly and is probably illegal in some parts of the world. It was a clever ruse that I almost fell for. (Hmm, upon reflection, I guess I did actually fall for it. I just realized my mistake and took corrective action.)

Among the search engine industry is the relatively new concept of negative SEO. I don’t see the techniques associated with negative SEO as anything new; now they just have a name. Most of the conversations about negative SEO discuss a third party interfering with your SEO efforts but is not damaging your own SEO efforts also a form of negative SEO?

Negative SEO Through Frames

I had been taught that using frames to create webpages would hurt search engine optimization before I even learned how to program a site using frames. Why learn how to do something that was bad?

I was introduced to programming with frames as part of the one HTML class I have taken and I quickly saw why so many people were/are using them - they make managing a site quick and easy. But, are the benefits of using frames worth the negative SEO results?

Now let’s look at the SEO questions you should ask before using frames.