20 Ways You're Killing Your Website
Even if you’re totally obsessed with keeping your online reputation perfectly balanced, it’s possible that nobody is monitoring your website. And that puts you at risk.
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Others are devoted to maintaining every detail of their online presence, and painstakingly keep a meticulous record of their online interactions, even down to the particular website visitors read. Some people have only one online presence – and then work to make sure all the details of that one are well publicized.
This is a lot of work – and yet, there’s very little goal-oriented thinking about what it all means.
This is not true of the companies that are constantly hacking into your web browser and tracking your online behavior.
No company has its own page where it reports how many people used its product last month, or what pages they visited, or which e-mails they opened, or which e-mails they responded to, or which websites they visited.
How much people are able to market themselves through search and referral sites depends on how much money they can make on each. Many of these sites are built on top of the data generated by the companies using those search engines, so to some extent you are the guarantee of their profitability. You generate the revenue. They pay for your marketing and design work.
This is how corporations are able to dominate online success – so it seems far better to focus on optimizing the legitimacy of what you’re doing.
There’s a couple of ways to do this. You can convince your clients to compensate you for the time and effort they put into your pages. Or you can pay website hosting companies to take care of website maintenance for you, which will make it less likely that someone is trying to hack into your website. If you leave your website as it is, and the basic reporting systems are in place, the data a hacker can get can be pretty much anyone’s.
Of course, most of us would rather spend our time on better generating good press, rather than following outbound links. So that’s a problem.
If you know that a few people are taking out ads about your business on some blog, if they upload a whole bunch of links to your website, if other people link to your site to get links to your website, or if someone pretends to be you and starts trying to disrupt your business – you shouldn’t count on anyone monitoring all those actions.
But if you don’t know for sure that someone is doing this, or something equally sophisticated isn’t going on, then you should probably be paying someone to watch all this, so that you can be sure that people aren’t posting dishonestly. That would mean paying more attention to who you’re connecting with online, and who you’re not, and what you’re linking to on the web.
But there’s another problem, too: after you read your name in the newspaper or on some other web-based media outlet, what do you get when you turn on your computer? It’s likely to load your online presence, without any tracking system in place. Sure, you can keep a detailed, fully clear record of your web behavior, and try to reach out to those people as you are typing, but unless you’re using a computer program that does that, you’re going to get a great deal of junk, and not a lot of worthwhile information.
Any online website the state keeps track of has a publicly view able web directory, and plenty of other records too. But it’s easy to miss a lot of the information in these directories, and even easier to miss it when the information is outdated.
Your online reputation depends on having a web presence in the first place. If you keep it practically nonexistent, you’re not going to be doing yourself any favors. It’s better to buy a web monitor, than to do nothing at all.
There’s a reason people focus on building their online presence as much as possible, rather than monitoring it. It’s a massive amount of work, and if all you do is update your website more often than you update your home page, it’s going to take a very long time for the signal to reach your noise.
You’re going to be making a lot of mistakes. You’re going to miss a lot of things. But at least if you’re paying someone to do the work, you’ll have control over how long that information is out there – and you can add all the details you want if you want to change it.