Online reputation management is a sub-set of practices in the large discipline of SEO which ultimately hinges on taking the results you desire to the front page for a particular search term. In the case of online reputation management the SEO practices are applied to your name
(weather that be your personal name or the name of your company).
Planning an online reputation management without a reputation management agency may seem like a huge under-taking but here is a few steps to help you plan your basic online reputation management campaign .
Step 1: Find where you stand
The first step is figuring out where you stand in the various search engines. To do this it is important to log out of all your Google profiles, clear your browsers cash and then search for your name. You probably want to go 3 – 5 pages deep ( a little further than most people do,
just so you know what’s out there), repeat this process on Bing and Yahoo, collect all the URL’s and classify the links as positive, negative, or no impact.
Step 2: Set up Alerts
At this point you are going to want to set up alerts for your name, whether this be through the Google Alert platform, Google’s “Me on the Web” tool, or a third party reputation management software. This will allow you to get alerts the moment new material becomes listed on the search engine index. Making sure you can respond to it quickly and take care of negative information before it hits the front page.
Step 3: Boost the Positive
One of the important steps to prevent negative content is to solidify the stance of any positive content associated with your name so that it can’t be bumped off the front page. If you own the content you will want to take some steps to boost the on-page SEO value (such as polishing up
the meta information), if you don’t own the page then it’s time to get to backlinking, the author/publication sections on your Google+ profile, and LinkedIn profiles are great places to start!
Step 4: Create New Positive Assets
Most reputation management companies recommend that you fully own the top two pages for your name if you want to feel fully secure against negative attacks. So how do you go about doing this? Simply making more positive assets across multiple sites. Creating profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are a must, as well as Flickr, Quora, Slideshare, Vimeo and Youtube.
If you have the time make sure to flush out these profiles, add valuable content to them, not only does this allow them to be further entrenched on the first page, but it gives them an opportunity to be discovered and shared by potential clients!
Amber Scott is a marketing intern at Synqk.com a New York Based Reputation Management Company
