Reputation Management Online

Often in the passed before the revolution of the online world having a unique and memorable name wast often a good thing.  How times have changed since the rise of the internet, or as it could be called nowadays the Customer Review Network.   When deciding on a name you must consider the pros and cons.  Having a unusual name makes it easier to do well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), however the big downside to this of course is it makes it very easy for negative comments in forums, blogs and 3rd party sites to start appearing on the first page of Google.

Here is a great example of 2 very well known restaurant franchise companies KFC and MacDonald’s.  If you google these two names you will notice two different outcomes the first 3 or 4 results for KFC are websites managed by KFC however most of the results below them are negative.  Do the same for McDonald’s and you will only get positive results, why is that?  The main reason is McDonald is of course a Scottish name and a very strong one, so there are many groups like the McDonald clans, families and other businesses all trying to get to the top of the SERPs for the search term Mcdonald.  Not only that, McDonald Restaurants  are also very proactive on the net and have 100′s of websites which smother the first few pages of the SERPs.

So if keeping you company name clean on the net is number one priority make sure you choose a name that is quite generic but not overly broad, so for example Car Garage Ltd would be to generic, but Chicago Car Garage maybe OK.  Also make sure you check the user-name is available using tools like http://knowem.com/ If you do a search on the main social network sites, it could be enough to put you off using that name if they are not available on sites like Twitter.