Ok, here should be a comprehensive guide to managing your own online reputation and the things you SHOULD be doing to preserve your own/brand name. If you’re here, you’ve already shown an interest in making sure you’re doing what you can to keep your head above the proverbial current of the internet. Or you’ve found yourself in an unpleasant situation and are facing unwarranted negative press/publicity and are seeking ways to rectify your situation.

The following list assumes that you are aware of what the internet is, how to work a search engine and that you have your own webpage. You know, the basics. Here’s our Top 10 Reputation Management Tips:

1/ Structure Your Website Around Keywords

Fairly obvious for some, but you’d be surprised how many companies fail to structure their websites for SEO  (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. You need to imagine what people would be searching for when they’re looking for your specific business (and other words relevant to your business type and/or location) and tailor your site to focus on these words. SEO is a big market and it can take months to pick up a healthy proportion of the tricks of the trade, but the least you can do is name your pages aptly – i.e. no ‘Page 1′, ‘Page 2′ or ‘Page 3′ or ‘Untitled Page’ extensions. Having a url that reads http://www.yourcompanyname.com/productname.html for example will ensure that at the very least your page will rank highly in search engines for specific searches pertaining to your company/the products you sell.

2/ Employ Proper Writers

There is very little that’s more off-putting to a reader than poorly written content on websites. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, or how interesting the subject material is meant to be – if it isn’t written properly people will not only not want to read it, but will think less of you for it. There are different ways of bringing somebody onboard to maintain a high level of quality. You can bring on dedicated Content Writers who are typically full-time staff (on temporary or permanent contracts) whose job it is to specifically generate new content from scratch to put on your website(s). Content Editors are similar, but their job is focused more on revising existing material. Then you have Copywriters whose job is to write (/generate content) about a topic/product in a way that ‘advertises’ the material at hand. You don’t have to take on a writer full-time though if the project is small enough, as a lot of writers will do freelance jobs too. It’s usually advisable to have somebody on the company payroll to handle any potentially sensitive subjects though!

3/ Handle The Social Networking/Media Scene

Unfortunately social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have now been around so long that you can no longer pass them off as ‘New Technologies’ (or a form of ‘witchcraft’). Facebook especially, whilst not the original social networking medium on the internet, now has over 500 million users worldwide. In fact, that’s how many users they had before they made a film about the website. That’s right, the website is so popular they made a film about it. So you can bet your hind legs people use it. And more importantly, they expect you to use it too. We’ve covered on this website previously the importance of managing your presence on social networks, so I’ll make this as brief as possible. Even if you don’t feel you have time to commit to running a social networking site alongside any other official business websites you have, you still need to have a profile people can find. If you don’t have control over a social networking page pertaining to your company/brand name, who does? There’s nothing stopping anyone else setting up a page with your name on it and making a mockery of your business, so don’t give them the opportunity. It’ll take less than 15 minutes to set up a page even for the most technologically shy out there.

4/ Ensure You Are Sharing (Pre-Approved) Photos/Images

This one often gets overlooked even by the biggest companies/establishments. In the era of Web 2.0 and UGC (User Generated Content), everyone is a web publicist. And everyone wants pictures. Of everything. Even if it’s just for research, people will use search engines to look not just for websites, but images and pictures related to their keyword-based searches. So if somebody wants to search for, say, Oatmeal-Powered Motorbikes, and your company sells them; when they search for images of Oatmeal-Powered Motorbikes it should be YOUR Oatmeal-Powered Motorbikes they see. Image searches will display pictures relating to the search, and provide details of the image and provide automatic links back to your website. Also, you might want to have profile pages for key members of staff who might be the subject of User Searches – it helps with SEO and having official pictures of staff makes it less likely for searches returning results irrelevant or compromising pictures.

5) Addressing The World of the Blogs

People like to feel noticed. They like to feel appreciated, like they’re being kept in the loop and respected enough to be addressed directly. A blog can be a great way of presenting yourself to your market in the most professional manner possible. This can be done in the form of a personal blog from a company director, or a less personal company blog detailing business related updates (amongst other forms of blogs). Not only are you creating another website relating to your business that can rank in search engines results (potentially increasing traffic to your site too), but you can use them to relegate potential negative/rival content too. If you’ve got a good grasp on the internet goings-on, you might want to speak to existing ‘bloggers’ about doing pieces on your business. We’ll cover this later on in the week in more detail, so stay tuned for that – it’s not to be approached casually as it could backfire!

6/ Documenting Interviews / Podcasts

Another way of getting more positive content out there is by releasing interviews and podcasts from prominent members of your business. Interviews don’t have to be live question and answer sessions, but simply addressing a list of the most Frequently Asked Questions in a new and refreshing way. With the likes of iTunes and YouTube readily available to host videos, you can again give people content over multiple platforms to cover your bases. Don’t throw together a basic picture-based slideshow made from Windows Live Movie Maker or something pants like that, as making feeble efforts at videos makes you look ‘out-of-touch’ with the internet and will do more harm than good. But video diaries are great, and people can ‘subscribe’ to new content coming out of YouTube (and various other) accounts, and the more you do the more attention you will attract. Just, don’t go saying anything you’ll end up regretting – get your content reviewed by people who aren’t just going to blow sunshine up your *** prior to releasing anything.

7/ Set Up Your Own Review Sites

One of the things the era of user generated content sites have spawned is the concept of review sites. These are pretty self-explanatory; people go to these sites to either say lots of nice things about you, or it gives them a chance to moan and display their dissatisfaction with their experiences with you. Let’s face it, nobody’s perfect and you can’t please everyone (without going out of business), so there are going to be people who feel aggrieved with your business and service. If you’re having issues (or wish to prevent potential issues from arising) you might want to consider setting up your own, branded reviews site. If done right, it will rank in search engine results higher than the defamatory content and is another opportunity to show the internet all the best parts of your business. It’s best not to ‘fake’ positive reviews (or post false content anywhere online in general), but asking customers to send you feedback and being a bit selective over the submissions that make the final cut is OK.

8/ Press Releases

This is a very good way of getting high-ranking positive content out into the world of t’internet. While you have your own website(s), and now Social Networking Profiles, YouTube/iTunes channels and Official Blogs, you’re going a long way towards dominating the first page of search results pertaining to those ‘keywords’ we discussed earlier. With ‘Press Releases’, you can put official pre-approved content on 3rd-party websites too (ones that don’t belong to you!). This is a good alternative to Blogging if you don’t have the time to do both, as it offers a one-time official statement/story about your company and – here’s the important part – you get to write it (or at least have copy approval). It usually costs for this service for a good press release site, but is ultimately worth it. You also don’t want a bad/poorly performing site to host your content (counter-intuitive, right?) as it doesn’t help you in the likes of Google rankings. But yeah, go nuts. Throw in some pictures, some “official company quotes”, write it in third person – you get a lot of freedom to play around with formatting but one of the key aspects is that it has to be interesting enough to read, so make sure it’s something worth writing about. Words for the sake of words wont add any value to anything.

9/ Own Your Brand Name

Again, this might sound like stating the obvious, but there’s actually a bit more to it than you might think. One thing you really need to do is make sure that you control basic derivatives of your primary domain name. For instance, if I were to have www.kenisgreat.com (which I don’t, but, well – maybe one day), I’d also be sure to have www.kenisgreat.co.uk too. If somebody else were to register the .co.uk derivative, I’d have absolutely no control over the content. Which wouldn’t be as bad if it were being run by somebody else also called Ken, and we were competing for popularity, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was being run by somebody called… Dave… and Dave specifically wanted to make a website dedicated to the absurd implication that Ken isn’t great? This is perhaps one of the most important things you should have control over, as people will regularly bypass search engines if they’re familiar with your brand name. Users can type in web addresses speculatively, expecting to find information pertaining to your brand. And if they don’t find you, they might then go to a search engine to look for you. Or, if they find something they don’t like, they might not seek your business at all. You don’t have to have different websites for different domain names (which can actually be counter-productive for SEO purposes), and in fact the more URLs (and references to the different URLs) you have pointing to the same webpage will improve its performance and site traffic. Visit a domain registration website for the different domain extensions available. You don’t need them ALL, but a healthy selection of the most common is advisable. Also worth considering are derivatives of the brand/company name itself. So www.brandname.com might become www.thebrandname.com or www.brandnameuk.com – it’s up to you. You could even register www.brandnamesucks.com – just incase some other joker decides they want to.

10/ Watching Out For Negative Content

Perhaps the most important part of Reputation Management is being able to respond quickly and decisively to negative content as it arises. And it will, there’s no getting away from it – this is the internet; freedom of speech and such. Not knowing if somebody is trash-talking you is the biggest mistake you can make though, as defamatory stories (true or otherwise) about you only need so much attention before the seeds of doubt are planted and start to take root. Obviously, you can’t spend all day watching the entire internet for people posting compromising material. That’s crazy. No person can be reasonably expected to do that. Which is why there’s software out there that’s been designed to do it for you. You can create ‘Google Alerts’ which basically performs continuous searches for specified search terms and returns new results. You can choose how often to get updated, or what time of content you get updated with, and choose where these results are sent to. This would include having them sent to an email address that’s connected to a smartphone device, so you can keep up to date, on the move, all around the clock. If you were so inclined, that is. You might also want to look into setting up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds – similar system, but less Googlefied (a real word, honest). This basically takes feeds from all over the internet; monitoring the likes of blog posts, news entries, audio and video and relaying the information in a uniform format.

There’s a lot you can do to manage your own online reputation, and the above list is by no means exhaustive. Also, the above advice only covers the things you can/should do, and there’s a lot you should specifically stay clear of too. We’ll shortly be doing a follow-up post to this covering the Top Ten Don’ts of Reputation Management which you should also probably take note of. Meanwhile, if there’s anything you need help with or would like to discuss this topic further, check out the reputationmanagementfor.com homepage. We’ve been doing this a while and we’ve gotten pretty good at it!

To rank first on major search engines is an objective most internet marketers and websites look for. Most of the companies optimize their websites to get on that first page of search engine results to invite visitors to their website. But is there anything other than SEO to get there?

Well, there are the Social Networking sites, and there’s enough evidence that SNS influences search engines. What happens, for example, when you have a facebook site with 10,000 fans and as many ‘likes’? Do they show up high on search engines?

There’s no doubt that Google closely monitors social media data with real-time Twitter updates integrated into searches. Now how they use it is a different story and it’s very hard to say because strong social media popularity usually converts high ranking on search engines. It’s a clear indication that Google uses it to determine what a trusted source is and this was something they had mentioned long time back.

Brand value of a domain was a ranking factor

It means you can probably improve your ranking in Google by promoting your site on social networks.

Social media is here to stay, because it is one of the most striking things to happen in a “free” market. All you invest is time. So take time to listen what people have to say about your business. If you are one of those curious types, make use of Google Alerts, YackTrack, Social Mention BackType and Trackur.

The year 2011 will be all about social media and the influence it has on search engines.  Remember when you share informative article and blogs with consumer, such interaction will only add value to your business. This in turn establishes you as an influence and fetches you higher rankings on the search engines.

Remember your company website’s success is as important to you as your marketing.  So do some research, look around and adapt to the changing technology and start applying new social media strategies at the earliest.  You will be surprised with the results, because a little bit of online socializing can take your business reputation to great heights.

Recently we’ve been contacted by people asking about how much it would cost to clean up a companies reputation if they bought the company? Here is a great article about what a reputation is worth to a company www.businessweek.com

What is the first thing any potential savvy investor or buyer going to do before they buy a company, is do some research.  Where is the easiest place to start?  That’s right, they Google It!!!  An investor will Google not only the company name but also the directors and the CEO, so taking measures to make sure your reputation is positive on the net is critical.    Not only are investors opinions important but also the public in general especially if you have shares to sell.

Often a company will make the mistake and monitor how their site is doing for keywords and forget about what people are saying about their actual company.  Customer service is more crucial than ever before and having terrible sales guys can hurt you in more ways than one.  You only have to see what’s happening with DotComChrome and how many people are complaining about their aggressive sales tactics.  It’s so bad there sales guys ask you to type in their company website in the URL bar rather than just Google dotcomchrome as their is so much negative stuff about them.

So if you are selling shares or looking to get investors make sure you check your online reputation first, if you don’t, it could cost you a fortune!!!