Protect Your Image with Search Engine Reputation Management

On the Web, it's easy for someone to ruin your business' reputation. Think about it. If someone really has a grudge against your business or you personally, he can pretty easily find hundreds (or even thousands if really digs) of places online to post negative information about your business.

One problem is that even if your angry customer only posts in a single location, it can still be spread rapidly to other web sites via RSS feeds and manual human intervention.

The first step in search engine reputation management is to try and make your dis-satisfied customers happy. Do they have real reasons to be unhappy? If so, fix the problems.

So, assuming you have a handle on whatever issues are causing irate customers, what do you do to counter all those web pages that contain a negative review of your business?

You basically have two options: you can do nothing, and hope that potential customers don't see the negative information, or you can be proactive and try to minimize the chance of potential customers seeing those reviews.

What you have to do is create your own content that pushes the content you don't want people to see much further down the search engine rankings. It has been proven in numerous studies that the top results on a search engine results page receive most of the traffic for any given keyword. Once you get to the second page and beyond, those results only receive a sliver of the total traffic. So if you get the pages with the bad reviews pushed below pages that are more favorable to your business, then you greatly reduce the odds of anyone even seeing those pages.

So just how do you go about getting your web pages ranked above the pages that contain the negative reviews? There are several basic steps:

1. The first step is to figure out what keywords people are using to search for your business that are resulting in the display of web pages that are negative toward your business. There are a couple of ways to do this: check your stats, spend some time performing searches related to your business, and use the Google Alerts service to notify you whenever web pages appear in Google that reference your business.

2. Then start building pages on your own web site that are optimized for your target keywords. Follow the basic rules: name the pages with the keywords, and use the keywords in the page titles, page headers, and in the copy in bold.

3. After building the pages on your own site, you should build pages on other sites that Google considers to be "authority" sites, such as popular social networking sites. Google tends to rank such pages highly, so they will probably rank faster than your own pages. Make sure to optimize your social networking pages for the same or very similar keywords used in step 2.

4. Now do some article marketing, directory submission, social bookmarking, and various other strategies to give some "link juice" to the pages you created in the steps above. This will help those pages rank faster and higher.

If you follow the steps above, you can greatly clean up your online reputation. Unfortunately, it is a great amount of work. The typical business owner is too busy to sit around doing research and building web pages. For that reason, it is probably a good investment just to hire a company already experienced in the steps involved in search engine reputation management. Firms like Work Media already have tools and strategies in place to accomplish these tasks much quicker, so it may make sense for your business to pay to have it done rather than try to do it all yourself.