Using SEO to Manage Your Online Reputation

Is there a page you don't like about your company on the web? The best way to "take care" of undesirable material with a high organic ranking is through search engine optimization, writes SEOmoz.

Image via CrunchBase

Google has posted advice on how to remove unwanted pages, but its strategy is mostly to contact the person who put up the unwanted webpage and trying to convince them to modify and maybe remove it, with the option of taking the request to court if the page contains something illegal.

But there is a third method – left wanting in Google's response - that involves using SEO to help with reputation management. Unfortunately, it is neither easy nor cheap.

The three main components of an SEO-fueled reputation management campaign:

1. Identify which keywords produce prominently listed and undesirable results.
Create content on multiple sites that will outrank the negative content, keeping in mind that Google generally only lists a maximum of two pages from a single domain on a given results page.

2. Optimize those pages with content & links to achieve rankings higher than the negative content, thus "pushing it down" to the 2nd page of results (or further).

3. To create content with the aim of outranking a negative result, leverage as many positive "pre-existing" conditions as possible.



Read more...