Guest post: Protecting Your Online Reputation With Affordable SEO by Mike Munter

When you enter your name or your business name into Google, do you like what you see? Is there any content that shows up on the first page of search results that you wish was not there?

It’s a lot easier to protect our online reputation in the off-line world than it is in the online world. In the online world, everything is permanent and it is easy for anyone to publish anything they want about you. So, how do you clean up what you see in Google’s search results? This is where the reputation management services can help.

The first thing you can do is make contact with whoever published the derogatory comments about you. If the content you don’t like is a YouTube video of you dancing on the bar at Hooter’s last week, you can probably just ask your friend to take the content down. But if the content is a bad comment about your business posted to Yelp, chances are pretty good that you will need to do a little more work. Reach out to the customer and see if you can turn the situation around with some great customer service. [Editor’s note: This is a great example of the transparent web in action]

But what if you are unable to contact the owner of the content? What if you are concerned that contacting them will just fan the flames and they will begin bashing you or your business again? You have to evaluate that for yourself and sometimes the best approach is just to let sleeping dogs lie and take matters into your own hands. This is when you hire online reputation management services.

Reputation Management In Action

Online reputation management works as a function of two aspects of SEO. The first is to create many pieces of positive content that represents you and your small business the way you want to be seen. Creating profiles for yourself on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Myspace, and others is a great place to start. Most importantly, you control the media. You put up the facts and information that YOU want people to know about you. You can also create your own business website (with your name or your business name as the URL). Create free blogs using Blogger, WordPress, and Posterous and add about 300 – 500 words of outstanding content about your business and what you do [Editor’s note: You can learn more about this in our guide to small business blogging]. Again, include your business name in the URL, if possible, and make sure your name and business name appear 2 or 3 times within the content you are creating.

As you create these sites, link them together using your name and business name as the anchor text. In other words, put a link in your wordpress site for your business name that points directly at your Twitter account, when clicked on. Have your LinkedIn account list various websites and point them at different social media accounts. You can find instructions on how to do this by Googling “Optimize LinkedIn”.

By doing this, you are creating an effective spider web, with each of your accounts pointing at each other. This is the first step in the online reputation management process – creating and interlinking your own media.

Step 2 in the process is to create backlinks from outside sources to boost your content further. Usually this is where you will need to hire a service, such as an SEO company, to help facilitate that process for you. Most of us do not have the time to go out and create all of the backlinks we need, in order to help all of our content to rank.

Once you have your SEO company in place boosting your content with link building, you will soon begin to see that your newly created content is moving up in search results for your name and business name. When your content reaches the first page of Google search results and continues to move up, any content you do not like is automatically pushed down. Usually within 3 months, the disparaging website or nasty comments about you are pushed off of page 1, to page 2, where most prospective employers and potential customers will not look.

It’s good practice to Google your name from time to time, just to check your online reputation and make sure you like what you see. Most problems can easily be fixed in a matter of a few months.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.

Or subscribe via email.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Tim Peter & Associates helps companies from startups to the Fortune 500 use the web to reach more customers, more effectively every day. Take a look and see how we can help you.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, reputation management, search, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, small business blogging, social, social marketing, social media, social strategy, strategy, success