SEO - 10 Reputation Management Tips For 2010

No matter what type of business you are in, at some point in time you may need reputation management help. It is rare for every business to make everyone happy and sooner or later you might get an unflattering internet posting about your business or worse.

Getting a bad business review or any type of negative mention of your business name online can cause your business loss of sales, revenue, and consumer trust. The fact is, most internet users will turn to highly visible internet sites like complaints board, yelp, and rip off report to file a complaint against you. These online complaints will usually rank very high on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. When people search your company name on Google and these complaints show up, it is time for some aggressive online reputation management.

Your goal in a case where a complaint or bad review shows up high is to make it go lower in the search listing. You will need to basically bury that "bad" link.

Here are a few tips to help you control what search engines show within the top results about your business:

1. Register Your-Business.com, .net, .org
2. Install a blog, micro-site, information portal on these new domains with unique content.
3. Create business social profiles on popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook Pages, Linkedin, Econnect.Entrepreneur, and others.
4. Link these social sites to your new websites (1 link per social site).
5. Get back links to the new domains and social sites you created. Back links are basically when you find a website with authority (PR) to link to yours. Do not use sites that are link farms or link directories. Try to find bloggers and websites that do not openly advertise that they sell links.
6. Find bloggers that will write about your company in a positive manner. There are thousands of blogs that will write about your company or publish an article about you for free or a small fee. Link to your websites and social site from within these blog posts.
7. Join forums within your niche or industry and become active on these forums. Use your company name as the username and in the signature of all your posts.
8. Write articles about your business and press releases. Submit these articles to trusted article and press release directories. Again, try to get some links back to other pages about your business.
9. Create free blog accounts on free blog providers (blogspot, WordPress, and others) use yourcompanyname.freeblogsite as the URL, and start posting original content.
10. Keep updating and adding content to all of your social networks. Stay active online and be patient.

There are thousands places to create new content that will show up high (Rank) within Google's search results, the above mentioned tips are some of the more popular methods and can be used for businesses or individuals.