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International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

Author:  Dustin Woodard

Online reputation management is increasingly important as more and more friends, family and employers search your name. Even if you are always on your best behavior online or you have a fairly unique name, as the population swells and more people become creators of content on the web, there’s a great chance that people will mistake others activity online as your own!

Controlling or managing search rank for your own name is fairly easy for an SEO (search engine optimizer), but what can the average person do? Below I outline a number of free, quick, easy and effective ways to populate the first page of results for your name. I highly recommend people start creating content for their name now as it will be much more difficult after waiting for someone else with your name to muddy the search results to spur you to action.

1) Create a Blog
Even if you build just a one-page site using your name on a free blog network, you can quickly use your blog to create pages about yourself and link to other pages you are going to create on this list. Use your name in the blog name.
Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes
Free Options: Blogger (blogspot), Wordpress, LiveJournal

2) Create a Wiki
Several wiki platforms have done a great job of creating publishing tools that are even easier to use than most blog technology. Though wikis are best suited for group collaboration, the will also work well helping you link to your blog and other pages. Use your name in the wiki name.
Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes
Free Options: Wetpaint*, Wikia

3) Register your domain
If you are lucky enough to have [insertyourname].com (or .net, .org, .info) available, snatch them up. The $8 a year fee is well worth it even if you don’t actively build a site using it because, at the very least, you are preventing your competition (other people with your name, or people who don’t like you) from ranking high for your name. Even better, use your domain for the site or wiki you are going to create.
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes
Cheap Options: GoDaddy, Yahoo,1&1

4) LinkedIn
Set up a LinkedIn profile and make it publicly available. Add background info like education, employment history, awards or certification (or anything else you are proud of). Add links to your other sites/pages.
Estimated time to complete: 5-10 minutes

5) Jobster
Some people are a little shocked when they find out their Jobster profile shows up in search. Not you, because you want it to! Create a jobster account, allow it to be publicly available, fill out a little employment info, answer a couple questions, but write it keeping in mind that your current employer could come across it.
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes

6) Myspace
Myspace pages tend to show up in search as well. Though Myspace has probably ruined more people’s reputations than helped, you will create a clean Myspace page for your name and, if you feel the urge, put the racy stuff on a different profile.
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes

7) Flickr
Flickr accounts and images have a great chance of showing up in the engines, especially for image searches. Creat an account, upload a few photos you like and label them with your name.
Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes

Comment on Popular Post
Sometimes I see a commenter’s name show up in search. Find a popular blogger site or newspaper site that allows comments, and find a post that you feel comfortable commenting on. Use your real name for the name field. Try this on a couple sites.
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes

9) Employer Site
If your employer features profiles on their website, ask them to add one for you. If not, talk them into it or author a post on their blog (if they have one).
Estimated time to complete: 5-30 minutes, depending on your company

10) Join a Forum
Do a search for a forum that you might want to participate on. For example, if you are into guitar, you should search for “guitar forum.” If it looks like a place where it would be easy for you to make five or six posts, then sign up and use your name for your profile name. Make your five posts and fill out your profile page with information about you and use your name at least once in the profile description.
Estimated time to complete: 15 minutes

*Disclosure: I work for Wetpaint, but honestly believe their wiki solution is the best option

In the future, Facebook might also be an option. They recently allowed profiles set to public to be crawled, but they are showing logged-out status of your profile, which is basically your name and picture right now. Eventually, I believe, Facebook will open it up to show your full public profile (probably in ‘08).

Keep in mind, Google usually only shows two results for any one site. That’s why I have you contributing on multiple sites. A couple more tips:

• If you ever receive a great interview or bio online, link to it from your sites.
• For online activity that you don’t want to be associated with your name, use a nickname or “handle” that is completely different from your real name.
• If you have stiffer competition for your name, you may need to spend more time building out and linking to the various options I list above.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

Author: Cynthia Mosher

Building a name for yourself is essential to success in today’s internet business world. People want to do business with and offer their money to people they feel they can trust. These ten steps will go a long way to helping you build a reputation of trust with your visitors.

1. Present a Real Face
Showing your web site is a legitimate physical business you will boost your site’s credibility. The simplest way to do this is by providing a physical address and telephone number for voicemail contact. It also helps to post a picture of yourself or your office and place a list of memberships you belong to such as the chamber of commerce and professional organizations for your business field.

2. Provide Authority
Give authority site links to research and information you present. Even if the reader does not check your information, seeing the respected source of your statement instills trust in your information and your site. And just the opposite - don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.

3. Highlight Your Staff
People like to know who runs things behind the scenes. Offer brief “about us” information for your staff, even if it’s just you and your partner, freelancer, or virtual assistant.

4. Share Your Experience and Expertise
Are you an expert on some topic? Make that known on your site, in your About Us page and wherever appropriate in articles and resources. List your education and accomplishments in specific areas of knowledge and training.

5. Be Reachable
People like to feel there’s a real person there to communicate with. Give a personal email address and answer promptly. Provide a physical address, telephone number and fax number if you can. A customer help desk is a good addition for a busy site too. But most importantly, respond to their needs as soon as possible.

6. Present a Well Designed Site
Lots of people judge a website by its cover. Provide a professional look but keep it user friendly and consistent. Your design should be appropriate for your business and inviting to internet users of varying experience.

7. Keep it Simple
That snazzy flash page may dazzle some but for many others it will simply be overboard and they will click on by. Use the basics that load quickly and perform well for all internet users and don’t require them to update their computer software to view your pages. People are looking for information and they want it quickly and easily and don’t want to upgrade to get it.

8. Provide New Content Regularly
A site with the same content your visitor saw last month or even last week will give a feeling of absence or abandonment. Keep things current. Place new content weekly if you can. A blog is a great way to do this and you can schedule the content delivery to make it easy.

9. Keep Ads to a Minimum
Advertising should be for products or services you stand behind and should not constitute a large part of your site’s presentation. Featuring a new product or service every month or even every week can be fine. Just don’t bombard your reader with ads. It conveys a feel of your selling interest superseding your sincere interest in your customer

10. Present Clean, Error-free, Functioning Content
Spelling mistakes and broken links are a real turn-off. As an internet business owner you rely mostly on the written word to convey information and professionalism about you and your business. It is important that you present the best you can for your visitors and that it be functional and accessible when they need it.

Use these ten steps to establish your business online. Not only will you gain trust and respect online, you will gather a devoted audience that will spread the word. That’s the best advertising that no money can buy.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

by Jak Smith

It has become common practice for people to surf the web for news and information about people, places and companies. Researching new products and services is commonplace. It is expected that a prospective employer will conduct a thorough online search of any serious candidates for employment. Google has become the online manifestation of Orwell’s imagined “Big Brother”. If the algorithm has dealt you a bad hand, it is best you learn how to confront it rather than hoping it will disappear by itself.

As a service to the companies and individuals for whom a search yields negative results, or may suffer from this precarious condition in the future, we offer insights into the world of online reputation management.

You are Not Alone

With the advent of bloggers, RSS feeds and web sites, anyone can define a person’s or company’s identity and challenge a website’s reputation and integrity. The rise and expansion of consumer generated media offers the public an opportunity to express their views. And this is being done at an unprecedented rate. People are expressing their views unabashedly, often with no regard for the consequences of what they are writing, and with little for concern for the veracity of their comments.

The more a product, brand or company is exposed to public attention and scrutiny, the greater the likelihood that someone will want to challenge its reputation. This can include dissatisfied clients, customers and competitors, who may have legitimate complaints or rumor mongers and vindictive web site wizards, whose sole purpose is to challenge another website’s integrity. For example, 29 of the Fortune 100 Companies have at least one negative postings when “Googled”. These postings range from bad business practices and discrimination, to accusations that companies are connected to paramilitary death squads.

Negative postings are not only surfacing on large or even medium corporate search results. Stories, rumors and press accounts that date back a decade or more are also traumatizing ordinary people. Seemingly innocent pranks and mischievous adventures that college students may have engaged in, have appeared in top positions of search engine listings seriously damaging their reputations, careers and lives.

You Can Take Charge

Combating the tribulations of a negative Google listing means taking charge of the search results that come up for your name, company, etc. If left to the vagaries of the search engine’s algorithm, you can easily fall victim to the whims of arbitrary conjecture, opinions and rumors. When you decide to take charge, you need to confront the search engines in a proactive and forthright manner, rather than adopting a passive or defensive posture.

Online reputation and search engine optimization professionals will tell you that it is no longer an issue of “if” you should be managing your online reputation, the question is “how” you should be managing it. And don’t assume that just because you are happy with the results of your own personal search today, that situation will continue indefinitely. Being on guard means:

1. knowing that the situation can turn against you and
2. having the ammunition to combat the rumor mongers when they strike.

Like the proverbial lawyer who, when deciding to represent himself, discovers has a fool for a client, most people, even those who are comfortable in the world of the internet, are not competent to deal with the major league players when it comes to online reputation management. When you are up against a challenger that has Google on its team, you don’t want your teammates to be from the minor league, even if they can boast a relatively high batting score.

Working With a Pro

Successful ORM, focuses on having sufficient links to blogs, articles, press stories and allied web sites so that when a search is run for your name, all of the material you have positioned appears. The problem starts when a stubbornly entrenched negative press story or blog, appears on your page, and it overpowers all of the listings you have put in place, how do you dislodge it?

Measuring Success

Regardless of who actually manages your ORM campaign, what is required is distribution of positive content and strategic participation in online discussions which results in the creation and posting of positive content on your site. A successful search engine reputation management program ensures that those looking for information about you or your company will see favorable content wherever your name or your company appears as search results.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

Author: Artima

PARTICIPATION BREEDS PASSION

While listening to and participating in the conversation can seem intimidating and sometimes overwhelming, the benefits of doing this are impossible to ignore. Beyond the value of simply getting customer feedback, you can create relationships with each and every one of your customers, which was impossible before the blog. Participating in this conversation offers several benefits:

• Creates customer evangelists.

•Builds trust among your entire customer base.

• Helps you become a thought leader in your industry.

• Lets you share and gain knowledge.

• Provides product feedback.

• Uncovers new growth opportunities and new markets.

In fact, the ways in which blogging benefits your business are limited only by the creative ways you can find to use blogging, be they through internal blogs that get your employees the information they need to know, external blogs that help you become a leader in your industry, or product-specific blogs that let your customers interact with you in a meaningful way. Whether an individual is a saboteur or an evangelist, every relationship you create and every time you step outside the boundaries of your company, you can create positive new experiences with each and every individual with whom you interact.

CREATING CUSTOMER EVANGELISTS

One of the most powerful benefits of blogging is that it helps you create evangelists. In their 2002 article, Creating Customer Evangelists, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba tell us that passionate company evangelists can inform and empower your customers to carry your brand’s message to others.

Customer evangelists are powerful tools. When you give other customers the power to embrace your brand, they will take your brand’s message with them wherever they go, telling others about their experiences with your company and thereby extending your brand in a positive way that would not have otherwise been possible. Passionate messages can spread like wildfire; as soon as one passionate person enters a community, the dynamics of that community completely change. Most customers will become happy evangelists for your business and products if you provide enough positive experiences.

They need to love your company and your products, even if your products aren’t “perfect.” Creating passion isn’t about making people like you; it’s simply about using your passion to fuel more passion. The reality is that companies that create a stir, live on the edge, and try new ideas are going to be both loved and hated. And, just as in any relationship, sometimes you can’t be sure whether a customer is a true friend unless you listen to what he or she has to say. A blog is the perfect place for that.

BUILDING TRUST WITHIN YOUR CUSTOMER BASE

The best way to build trust is to be consistently trustworthy. Doctors earn trust after years of being fair, caring, professional, and knowledgeable. Similarly, your business builds trust with your customers in the real world by delivering on your promises. For example, if you promise to have the best prices but don’t, you are betraying your customers’ trust; if, however, you deliver on that promise consistently, customer trust increases as a natural result. Blogs are a great way to build trust, because they allow you a real person, and not some corporate marketing brochure to communicate with your customers, users, and community more regularly than any other medium allows. Ideally, your blog should attract at least one posting per day as a result, you have an opportunity to build trust by delivering on your promises daily.

BECOMING A THOUGHT-LEADER

Thought-leadership isn’t a new concept; it was proposed in the 1960s and finally given a name in the 1990s. The term refers to the ability to lead by proposing new and innovative ideas. The modernday application of thought-leadership with regard to business has been applied to companies that publish respected industry newsletters, participate in conferences (or host their own), and generally disseminate information in the hopes that more people will be exposed to the company and willing to invest in its products. The strong appeal of thought-leadership–based marketing makes a lot of sense, as becoming more visible relative to respected information ultimately means more interaction with customers and potential customers. The challenge for most companies engaging in a thought-leadership campaign is that it can be expensive. Maintaining newsletters, attending and speaking at conferences, and remaining publicly visible isn’t easy or cheap. Blogs provide a unique opportunity for thought-leadership in that they allow businesses to publish information people want in the way they want it. Add to that the ease of finding, subscribing, and contributing to blogs, and it’s obvious that blogs are one of WHY BLOG?

This question is an important one. Paul Chaney, a prominent blog consultant from Radiant Marketing Group, compiled this list of reasons why a business should blog:

• Search Engine Marketing Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines like Google and Yahoo!.

• Direct Communications Blogs provide a way for you to speak directly and honestly with your customer.

• Brand Building Blogs serve as another channel to put your brand in front of the customer.

• Competitive Differentiation Because blogs give you the opportunity to tell your story over and over, they help set you apart from the competition.

• Relational Marketing Blogs allow you to build personal, long-lasting relationships with your customer that foster trust.

• Exploit the Niches Blogs help you fill your particular industry niche.

• Media & Public Relations Blogs are excellent PR tools. The media calls you, not your competition.

• Reputation Management Blogs enable you to manage your online reputation.

• Position You as Expert Blogs enable you to articulate your viewpoints, knowledge, and expertise on matters pertaining to your industry.

• Intranet & Project Management Blogs make great, easyto- use applications for internal communications within an organization.

This may be one of the least well-known and underutilized areas of blogs. the easiest ways to engage in a thought-leadership campaign. The challenge, of course, is that you still need to create material, research and comment on news, and generally discover and impart information of value as you would via any other medium. Most companies that are highly attuned to their industry are aware of these challenges and are already addressing them.

TRANSMITTING VS. ENGAGING

Most businesses and companies function in a “transmission” mindset. When they have a new product, they exhibit some kind of advertisement be it a sign in the window out front or a national television ad. They try and create buzz by displaying SALE ! in advertisements and in the window, in great big letters that are impossible to miss. The reality is that people don’t want to be talked at, they want to be talked with.

Companies around the world are beginning to realize that while transmission-based communication is an important part of getting out your message, far more effective tools are at their disposal. Dialogue is a powerful way to broadcast your message while simultaneously getting customer feedback. Before blogs, press releases were one of the best ways to communicate news about your company. You’d send the press release to a local paper or wire service, hope that some fraction of journalists would pick up on it, and then you’d gain some exposure for a fairly low cost.

The problem with press releases and similar transmissionstyle endeavors, though, is that after the press release leaves your company, you rarely see any return. Traditional response rates for transmission-based advertisements, such as television ads, radio campaigns, and press releases, is reported to be a measly 1 percent. At best, you might see an article or two in the news, though most likely it will just be a regurgitated piece from your press release. Or worse, you hear nothing at all. Tools such as blogs allow you to go beyond the press release and traditional media coverage. They help you engage with your customers and create a real dialogue.

These dialogue-based initiatives don’t replace press releases, advertising, or focus groups they compliment them. Consider Boeing, a leading aircraft and aerospace manufacturer, which began ramping up the production and marketing of its new plane, the 787 Dreamliner. The company used the traditional transmission-style marketing: press releases, launch parties, media tours, interviews with engineers, and the like. However, Boeing also allowed Randy Baseler, vice president of marketing, to blog (www.boeing.com/randy). Through his blog, Baseler was able to extend the message into a dialogue that included information about a Boeing competitor’s offering, the Airbus A380. Baseler responds to posts on other blogs, discusses what other blogs are talking about, and reads a vast cross-section of flight and aviation blogs. This blog allows Boeing to use a transmission-style message, which is great for getting the cold hard facts out to the world, as well as a personal dialogue, which is great for communicating passion, having a conversation, and listening to what customers and aviation enthusiasts think.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) involves both search engine marketing and search engine optimization. Unhappy consumers, political groups, competitors and disgruntled employees may have an interest in posting negative information about you and your company. We take control of search engine results employing optimization as well as marketing to manage and control damaged corporate identities and reputations on the internet.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

Author: Rob Sullivan 

Over the past few articles I’ve brought you different tactics you can use to help build quality links to your site.And while I am going to continue to bring you even more of these tactics I thought it would be good to step back and take a big picture look at why link building is important.Further, I wanted to look at other things you should be considering when you are doing your link building: Namely managing your online reputation.

As the web evolves, reputation management becomes even more critical to your online business. This is because many people will form their opinion of your or your business based on the sites found around you.

An upset former customer can do a whole lot more damage to your reputation online that you may suspect. If they are a popular blogger, for example, and are able to call on their network of sites to help promote their negative view of you, it can have a detrimental impact on your search rankings.

This is because they can use a tactic called link bombing to rank higher than you for your name or the name of your company.

What do you mean links can be bad?

Just like how you need to build links to improve your link popularity and ultimately search engine rankings, links from other sites can work against you.

Let me give you a practical example:

If you do a search on Google for “miserable failure” or “failure” you will see that President George Bush’s White House bio is ranked number one. This is an example of many thousands of sites linking to the site’s bio page, with the anchor text “miserable failure” and “failure” in them. Google then counts these links as votes for the site for that phrase. Since the site receives the most votes it ranks the highest.

But this is just one example of using links to negatively influence search rankings. There is another where personal sites and blogs have used similar linking strategies to outrank corporate websites for negative terms.

I once talked to an attorney who was ranked #2 for his own name behind a blog site which went on about how terrible an attorney he was and how you shouldn’t hire him.

The blog site took advantage of the system by requesting links on the attorneys name from other bloggers, thus moving it ahead of the attorney’s own site.

It is this type of tactic which can be used against you because in this case, short of legal action, the attorney would have to build even more links to his site for his name than the negative blog.

In the mean time, however, the blogger continues receiving links as other sites which link to him now request the same links. It becomes a snowball effect. One link leads to three, which leads to ten, then a hundred, then 500 then 1,000 and so on.

That is the real power of blogging – the ability to quickly build links back to your site on virtually any phrase you chose to target.

And since bloggers have that much pull, they can (and in many cases do) use that ability against you.

But it doesn’t have to be just bloggers that do that. Any site that has the pull can post a derogatory page about you and flood the web with backlinks, through submissions to thousands of directories and other sites which don’t check for quality and will accept automated submissions.

And the kicker of this is, by the time you realize it has happened to you, it’s almost too late.

That’s because those links were submitted months ago and have passed Google’s aging policy. The only way you can combat this is to build a similar number of positive links and wait the same time until Google approves the links and adds them to your link inventory.

As you can imagine that can take some time so in the meantime your site suffers because of these negative tactics which were begun months ago.

So how you do combat negative links?

There is no real way to combat them. Once they are there they pretty much exist forever. The only real strategy is to ensure that you continue to build high quality relevant links to your site. Thus, you are essentially taking preventative action against those who may not have your best interests at heart.

That means using the tactics I’ve described in some of the recent articles, and continuing to monitor your link popularity.

It also doesn’t hurt to subscribe to services like Google Alerts. I use this to monitor a variety of keywords both in the news and in the organic rankings.

You could create an alert for your name and receive emails whenever there is a mention of your name – either through the news, or when a site begins to move in the organic rankings.

Then you can monitor a few sites to ensure that nothing magically appears ahead of you that is negative in nature.

And if you do find a negative site that appears on Google’s radar, at least you can take a somewhat proactive stance and begin building positive links at an increased rate, to keep them down in the rankings, and solidifying your position.

Summary

I don’t want to scare you with this. It’s not something that is rampant on the web. In fact, the average person has no idea how to “trash” you online, other than perhaps posting a negative comment on your website (if you allow commenting).

All I wanted to do with this article was to let you know that such individuals do exist. And they do have the power to supplant your positive online image with a negative review of you even if it is untrue.

But if you follow the rules of good link building you can help prevent such attacks from happening to you.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management involves both marketing and public relations along with search engine marketing. Visibility and high search engine indexing with good publicity which displaces negative publicity is the goal. This results in a increase in positive web presence, helping you own top spots in search engine rankings. Online Reputation Management enables you to protect and manage your reputation becoming actively involved in the outcome of search engine results.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

Cincinnati Enquirer - Facebook prank turns bad - December 21, 2007

ComputerWorld - Online reputations under threat - December 7, 2007

Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace - Washington Post - October 27, 2007

Philadelphia Inquirer - New web site is not fair to doctors - October 15, 2007

Washington Post - Ten Ways to Generate Good Web PR - October 10, 2007

Dealing with the Damage from Online Critics - New York Times - October 4, 2007

Office gossip has never traveled faster, ‘thanks’ to tech - USA Today - September 9, 2007

Defending Wikipedia’s Impolite Side - NY Times - August 20, 2007

The Saboteurs Of Search - Forbes.com June 6, 2007

USA Today - Your Internet Image is Everything - USA Today - April 5, 2007

Trash Talk
- Wall Street Journal - March 19, 2007

Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web - Washington Post - March 7, 2007

Your past is lurking online - Boston Globe - Feb 25, 2007

Internet Defamation can carry a Big Price Tag - Asian Tribune - October 12, 2006

Delaware Supreme Court Declines to Unmask a Blogger - New York Times - October 10, 2006

Harsh words Die Hard on the Web - Washington Post - March 6, 2006

Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia’s free world - Boston Globe - Feb 12, 2006

Hotel Reviews Online: In Bed with Hope, Half-Truths and Hype - New York Times - Feb 7, 2006

Delaware Supreme Court Declines to Unmask a Blogger - NY Times - October 6, 2005

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

by Apogee Search
Even after many years of untainted business practices, a single negative event can stain your brand image in the public eye for a long time. Simple things like a negative product review in a blog can be harmful to your brand, especially when competitors are standing close by to snatch up customers. One way to combat that threat is through a reputation management strategy, which can begin with search engine optimization (SEO).First, to understand how negative press can get to the top of the search engines results pages (SERPs), let’s reminisce and revisit the old urban legend of Pop Rocks and Coke. Amidst all the excitement around the popular fizzy candy, in the late seventies, stories began to spread around school playgrounds that, when mixed with soda, Pop Rocks could cause a mini-explosion in your stomach. Teachers overheard and passed on to mothers. The worried mothers then escalated the news to the press, and soon General Foods, the creators of Pop Rocks, had a reputation problem on their hands.

This telephone game of word-of-mouth is replicated online via link-building. First, someone publishes negative comments about your business. As others read the comments, more people start linking to it in blogs and discussion groups. Friends forward to friends, who forward to friends and so on. Next thing you know, the bad press is at the top of the search rankings.

Back in the Pop Rocks days, General Foods responded to the Pop Rocks fiasco with full-page print ads, letters to school principals around the country, and even sent the Pop Rocks inventor door to door to attest to its safety. But what could they have done had they lived in the today’s digital world?

Begin by Analyzing Keywords

If an online reputation disaster strikes you or a friend, the first step in the repair strategy should always entail keyword selection. You don’t want to continue optimizing the same keywords that are used for existing marketing purposes. Different keywords come into play in this case. Negative press usually appears when consumers search for your product or brand name, so focus your SEO efforts on company-specific keywords. The goal is to drive brand-friendly results up in the SERPs, while pushing the unfriendly press down.

You do this by creating more good press and optimizing around those selected keywords. Links embedded within press releases will give sites a ranking boost while the news is fresh and the press release is at the top of the newswire. When you’re embedding the links, don’t just hyperlink your top level domain every time. Instead, ask yourself, “Which links are most important to our situation at this time?”

Experiment with different hyperlinks to different pages and sub-domains of the site, and measure the results to determine which ones will drive your news up the ranks. Always make sure that links are embedded on top of, or near, your brand name.

Bury Negative Press through Link Building

The second step is link building. After all, if the negative press elbowed its way to the top of the SERPs through link building, you can do the same with positive press. It is an SEO ace in the hole, and it should be a major part of any SEO strategy. To counteract the negative press, build links to optimize brand and product names.

Think outside your corporate domain. Sub-domains, including news sites, corporate blogs and other pages outside your website, can be key SEO weapons in your arsenal as they take up more shelf space in the SERPs. Optimize these through link building, and make it a practice to ensure that the content on these sites is constantly updated and is as fresh as possible.

Lastly, go directly to the source of the negative press and request they also include rebuttal links. Ideally, they will publish another link on that post or page to your response (on your site) to the issue in question so that your positive messages are readily visible.

When it comes to the Internet, information is a constantly flowing stream, and it flows rapidly. The only real news is what’s up at the top of the results page, so use something that you know works to manage, control and shape those messages that you care about. SEO has a pivotal role in reputation management, as it can remove negatives and enhance positives on the first page of results, which is usually the only page that matters.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management