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How to Protect your Online Identity

Posted July 11, 2012 in News

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The huge brands invest impressive amounts of money in advertising and constantly try to make their name even more famous. In spite of these amazing efforts, it’s enough a single case that will negatively influence people’s opinion. A well known case is Lacoste, this brand is associated with elegancy, intellectuality, and respectable people. Anders Breivik, the author of the horrible attempts in Norway was wearing a Lacoste pullover and it was a very negative image for the great brand. It’s true, it is about a very important brand and a terrrible criminal, but there are many other cases when your online identity may be affected.

In order to avoid these unwanted situations, it’s highly recommended to establish yourself a strategy to be prepared for various cases. The old saying seems actual, it is by far easier to prevent that treat. There are two great categories of factors that may be harmful for your website:

• Internal ones, this category covers all the factors that depend on the actions of the user. More pragmatically, everything that is strictly related to what you have done or not.
• External ones, having no connection with your activity.

Internal factors:

1. The lack of control

Having a website that is highly visited is amazing but it supposes a great responsibility. Many readers mean that every time the respective online presence is visited and any issue is instantly remarked. No matter how trustful is an individual, as long as the favorite website isn’t rendered, the load time is bigger than normal or it is down he will search for other opportunities. Conclusion: he is lost and your brand suffers a lot.

Fortunately, there is a remedy for these situations and many people are satisfied with it. The solution is simple: a company that provides monitoring services. I prefer the services of this company and there are a couple of reasons to sustain my opinion. First of all, the brand of the company makes me think that they won’t allow themselves to provide poor quality services. Secondly, the infrastructure reveals that it is about a serious investment and no one spends that much money without a business plan behind. Much more, if you visit them, you will find out that they still didn’t finalize the investments. Thirdly, the testimonials of the previous clients are another proof that should be taken into consideration. All these are important but are incomparable with the effective services provided. It’s capital for your brand to resolve any issue of your website before the readers will notice it.

In conclusion, don’t ruin your affair just because you disconsidered the importance of having the control over the evolution of the online presence. The time and money invested are important but overall, you gain.

2. Select a very reliable hosting solution

Another important aspect is the hosting company you select. The conception that as long as something is free, you should benefit from it is widespread but not advantageous. I don’t advice you not to benefit from these offers but, in the huge majority of cases, these hide some clauses that aren’t advantageous. It ‘s very important to correlate the level of your business with the quality of hosting, if you have a personal blog not too visited a free hosting is pretty OK, while a serious brand should associate with another similar name from hosting industry.

3. Make a community around

Across time, many websites suffered various issues, some significant while others have less effects. It’s better to consider, that no matter how well prepared you are, sometimes your website won’t be accessible for various causes. Having a loyal community around your online presence is amazingly beneficial. There are tons of advantages and one of them is that the visitors will ignore the small problems if in the majority of cases they are respected and obtain useful information from you.

4. NEVER use black SEO measures

Everyone is interested in obtaining profit as soon as possible but very few businesses allow doing it very quickly. The mirage of having in your pocket the money invested in addition to a good profit is extremely attractive and some people simply don’t resist this temptation. The black SEO methods consist in obtaining better search engine positions with modalities that aren’t appreciated by Google and other search engines. This is a single advice and I hope you would understand it without attempting: sooner or later, Google will find out about your unfair strategy.

5. Keep/duplicate your files

Unfortunately, some decisions are hard/impossible to correct and it’s better to keep safe your files. In 90% it will be just a waste of time and resources, but in some cases it may be the wisest decision ever made.

External factors:

It’s impossible to divide these factors into categories because the imagination of the hackers has no limits. The modalities used are various and in fact, this is their job and very few details were discovered. The first thing to do against them is to treat the security of your website as being capital and any investment in this chapter should be done with no scarcity. Another potential issue for your online identity is to have stolen your domain name or making it down during business hours. You can use free or paid website monitoring services as a basic precaution. It doesn’t mean that someone effectively stole it from you; it could happen you forgot to renew it. Once again, the imagination of the thefts is amazing… Anyway, anything can be resolved. It’s about strong will and patience. I hope that you understand now how important it is to protect your work and most important, how simple it may be ruined by making one or two very wrong decisions.

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