By Linda Bustos (c) 2006

What do you see when you search for your company or brand name?Is there anything on the first page of the search engine resultsthat you wouldn't be proud to display on your home page?Consumer review sites, blogs and forums have made it easy foranyone to say whatever they want about your company, whetherthey be disgruntled customers or competitors who like to playdirty.
If you're in a situation where negative publicity is front andcenter in search results, there are ways you can reclaim searchengine real estate for your corporate identity. Though youcan't make negative results disappear from the search engineindexes entirely, the following strategies can help them slipoff the first few pages of search engine results.

1. Good Old Fashioned Networking
The first thing you should do is contact the webmasters of thesites in question with a polite request for removal of negativecomments. There's a good chance they'll be willing toco-operate. Note that, even if they do remove the listing, thecached pages may remain in the search engine indexes for sometime. But users who click through the search engine resultswill land on a page with the comments removed.
Check out some of the sites that already have something good tosay about you. Send them an appreciation note, and offer them alink back from your site. You could even create a special pagecalled "Gary's Garage On The Web" (if that's the name of yourbusiness) or "Press Room."

2. Tap Into the Power of Wiki
Wiki websites allow users not only to add their own content, butalso edit pages. They get their name from the Hawaiian word"wiki wiki" meaning "rapidly." There are many wiki pages likeAboutUs.org (http://www.aboutus.org) and LoveToKnow.com(http://www.lovetoknow.com) that you can use to create contentabout your company. If your company name is "notable" enough,you might also be able to create a page in Wikipedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page).

3. Raise Your Profile
Some websites like PR.com (http://www.pr.com) allowyou to post your company's profile. An annual fee might berequired. It's not easy to find these sites, but you may findsome opportunities by searching your competitors' names anddiscovering where they are listed.

4. Become A Socialite
Using social bookmark sites like Netvous (http://www.netvouz.com)and Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) is an easy way to addcontent through the web. You can create an account for yourselfthat bookmarks all of your positive press, and anythinginteresting on your website, such as articles or videos. Orcreate a photo gallery in Flickr (http://www.flickr.com). Thelinks themselves are not given much weight by search engines,but you have an opportunity to use your company name in thetitles and descriptions of your bookmarks and photos. Make sureyou make good use of the tagging feature, using general keywordsas these will also begin to rank for your name. For example,Gary's Garage should tag: "Garys Garage," "garage," "autobody,""mechanic," "mechanics," "body shop," "car," "auto body" and soon.

5. Become A Lensmaster
A company blog is certain to rank well, and it's easier thanever to create one with Squidoo.com (http://www.squidoo.com).When you create a "lens" for your site, you can easily uploadpictures and also make use of tags. Unlike other blogs, Squidoowon't show the posting date, so your lens won't look neglectedif you ever stop posting. You can build your blog's linkpopularity by submitting it to blog directories like LSBlogs(http://www.lsblogs.com) and BlogHub (http://www.bloghub.com),and linking to it from your site.

6. Write!
Articles can help you kill three birds with one stone. Not onlycan articles rank for your company name, they also buildvaluable backlinks to your site and position you as an expert inyour field. You can use your company name in the resource boxat the end of an article along with a link back to your site.Using your company name in the article body gives it a betterchance of ranking well. You can research potential sites tosubmit your article to by searching for one of your industrykeywords in a search engine like this: "car mechanics" + "submitarticle." Or submit it to various article directories likeArticle Alley (http://www.articlealley.com).

7. Encourage Testimonials
If you have customers who have given you positive feedback orprovided testimonials for your site, you could ask them to writea review for you on a website like Epinions.com(http://www.epinions.com), CoffeeGeek.com(http://www.coffeegeek.com) or ConsumerReview.com(http://www.consumerreview.com).

8. Explore Shopping Engines
If you sell products online, consider listing them in comparisonshopping sites, or "shopping engines" like Shopping.com(http://www.shopping.com), Bizrate (http://www.bizrate.com) orNextag (http://www.nextag.com). If you are not ready tomanage a new e-commerce channel for many products, you mightconsider listing one product in one engine to start.

9. Use Directories For Deep Links
Search engines still consider a page's number of relevantbacklinks to be a strong indicator of quality and relevance to asearch term. Octopedia (http://www.octopedia.com), WorldSiteIndex(http://www.worldsiteindex.com) and Microsoft's Small BusinessDirectory (http://sbd.bcentral.com/) are a few examples of soliddirectories that allow you to link to deeper pages of your ownsite, like your About Us page, to help raise their rankings foryour company name.

10. Post An E-Help Wanted Sign
Leverage the strength of sites like Craigslist.org(http://craigslist.org) to post your company's current jobofferings. Make sure you use your company name first in theposting headline: "Gary's Garage Now Hiring Junior GreaseMonkeys," for example. This will ensure the title tag for thatpage is optimized, which is very helpful for SEO. And make sureto describe your company in the ad, repeating your name threeor four times.

Tracking Results
I strongly recommend setting up an account with Google Alerts(http://www.google.com/alerts) (free) which monitors the top 50results, or with Google Alert (http://www.googlealert.com), aprofessional tracking system that will monitor the top 200results for you for as little as $4.95/month. You will benotified daily when new references to your name have been foundin Google – not only to see when your articles, profile pages,blog posts and so on get indexed, but also to keep on top of anynew negative or positive references to your name outside of yourown reputation management efforts.

How Long Will This Take?
Results may vary but they won't come overnight. You will getout of your reputation management efforts what you put in. Itcould take anywhere from a few months to a year.

Conclusion
These ideas are not exhaustive. You may come across your owntactics on your own through competitor research or your owningeniousness. If you are not familiar with SEO, consider hiringa consulting firm skilled in copywriting and public relations.The key is to look at reputation management as a long termactivity and to take advantage of all the options you have tokeep the search engine results positive.

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Linda Bustos is the Marketing Director for Image X Media, aVancouver web design
(http://www.imagexmedia.com/web_design) andInternet marketing (http://www.imagexmedia.com) firm.================================================================

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