Protect Your Online Reputation

Suppose your company's name is "Acme Services". You're a small business, registered with your county. Everyone locally knows who you are.

But people can't find you on the web.

They type in "Acme Services", but then a dozen different Acme Services websites pop up from all over the country. Other companies and organizations share your name. It's one of the disadvantages of being a smaller company.

While search engines are getting smarter at serving up local results, you still want your business to come up on the top of the list. One way to do this is through online reputation management.

Online reputation management is similar to traditional web site marketing, but rather than promoting a website, the emphasis is on promoting your name or brand. It's about creating content and linking it back to your site that emphasises your name or brand, rather than the services or products you sell.

To do this, you follow the same steps as you would in targeting a particular term for SEO. In other words, you seek to create references (links) back to your website that use your name as the link text. This can be done through the traditional way of directories, article links and blog posts. It can also be done through 'Web 2.0' methods. This includes social profile sites such as Facebook and MySpace and building out Squidoo pages.

When diverse pages link back to your site properly, it will help boost your website, above others, to the top of the search results when users type your name.