So you’ve decided it’s time to tackle your online reputation. Before you jump in and decide to hire someone or go at pushing negative results down yourself, consider these four things:

Goals

What are your goals for beginning an online reputation management campaign? Are you looking to remove a post completely or will you be content once a negative result appears only on page 3 and beyond in the search engines. Are you only targeting one search engine or multiple search engines? As with any project, once you have goals defined, it’s easier to not only start a project, but to identify when a project is successful.

Timeline

Not all online reputation management projects are easy. A reputable web site that you want to move down to page 3 for a specific keyword won’t budge quickly, so expecting results in a one month time frame isn’t always realistic, while in some cases, neither is 8 months. The amount of time and effort you put into producing results will effect your timeline, but how much time and effort do you have to dedicate to just this project – 5 minutes a day or 40 hours a week?

Budget

Hiring a consultant or company to assist you in your online reputation management can get expensive – anywhere from $97 from a small company that can get you results that you have no say in to hundreds of dollars per hour for well known consultants. Even if you decide to go at it yourself or dedicate an employee’s time to fixing your online reputation, things like Pay Per Click, copywriting, web site design/building, profile creation, and press releases can quickly add up.

Maintenance

Once you’ve met your goals – say the negative results appear on page 3 and beyond – there’s maintenance time to consider. Monitoring search results and keywords, updating sites to stay relevant, adding and creating new content to continue increase links, and claiming new profiles as they become available are all part of the maintenance needed to keep the results you worked so hard for. While search engine results have the potential of staying the same for ages, a negative news article that gets republished or linked to by a major contender down the road can mean that you start all over again with your online reputation management campaign. By staying ahead of the game and building power (via links) to your positive sites, a negative result that re-appears down the road won’t take as long to push down.

I’ve been meaning to post a series of articles for awhile now, and I’ve finally got all my thoughts organized in order to publish the posts.

I turn down a lot of projects based on my workload, the type of online reputation repair project that is being proposed, and budget constraints. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to help, however. So if anything, I hope that someone can take these posts and apply them to their own negative reputation and report back to me that, yes, they do have a positive online reputation now.

30 Days To A Better Online Reputation

Getting Started: Things To Consider

We’ve already covered the basics (101) on how to find positive mentions and analyze negative results as part of your overall reputation management strategy, so now it’s time to figure out how to create positive mentions in order to push down negative results or, for those without negative results, to own the first page of search results and beyond for your keyword, brand, company, or name.

Creating Social Media Profiles

Web 2.0 Profiles. Image Via Flickr

All the buzz lately is about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and hundreds of other social media sites. Some businesses, including some of my offline clients that only want to “deal with removing the negative results,” are initially against creating profiles on all of these social networking sites with the thought that they are either a waste of time or too time consuming. While I could go on all day about the benefits of starting conversations and dialogue on these sites, I realize that when a client signs on, my first priority is to complete the task at hand, which is to push down negative results. The thing about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, niche social networking sites, and the various social bookmarking sites is that many of them have both a number of links pointing to them and high PageRanks, allowing them to be trusted by the search engines and therefore rank high for any keywords that they are optimized for.

With sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, it’s easy to optimize those sites for your name, company name, or in some cases, a very specific keyword. With both Twitter and Facebook, you can create user names that will be used in the URL (brands like Whole Foods have their twitter ranking on the first page of Google for their keyword) or pages that can be optimized for longer tail keywords.

On top of those sites ranking for keywords easily, I also highly recommend that you claim your frequently used user name, company name, or name on as many sites as possible so that you don’t have to deal with other people claiming those profiles and possibly doing harm – writing negative opinions about your company AND ranking high for your keyword, responding to customers without your knowledge, or using your name to pitch products that you don’t endorse.

For starters, I’d recommend creating profiles – at minimum – on the below sites. These sites tend to rank high when optimized correctly and have high traffic volumes, which means someone will eventually claim your name; might as well be you.

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Naymz
• Google Profiles
• Squidoo

Why those sites? In my experience with helping clients out, those sites tend to rank high (top 10) in a short time period without much effort – a few links and optimized when creating (username = keyword, about or bio section has keyword in it, etc.) can garner you another positive listing in the SERP’s, allowing negative results to move down more quickly.

Now there’s (what seems like) thousands of social networking sites created each month. Not every site will rank high or even last that long. Once you create the main sites, start looking for sites that are related to your niche. Sites that you are active on will eventually rank higher no matter what, so while claiming your name/brand/keyword on as many sites as possible is helping you out against name squatters down the road, focusing all your attention on claiming names without any intention of updating those sites in the future means you may spend quite a few hours of work without much to show for at the end of each month, at least not in regards to your online reputation management strategy.

So here’s what I suggest:

• Find social networking sites related to your niche.
• Create profiles on sites like docstoc, scribd, and youtube. These are examples of sites that allow you to upload documents and content, create links back to your site, and get links from various sources.
• Create profiles on article marketing sites. You’ll also use these sites to upload articles, but creating logins and usernames now will both save you time later on and get the profile claiming out of the way. Sites like ezine articles can often rank high for your name or keyword once you get started with article uploading.
• Create profiles on social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is the process in which you bookmark a page, blog post, or site using tagging features. Sites like StumbleUpon and Digg can get your site a lot of traffic if your keyword is found popular or interesting. Take a look at a site like social poster for a list of social bookmarking sites to begin claiming profiles on.
• Use sites like Knowem, Namechk, or Usernamez to find all of the credible and popular social networking sites that are currently available for you to create profiles on. Sites like knowem also have a service that allows you to outsource the profile claiming for a small fee (unless you have a lot of time, the time involved with creating profiles can get quite high).

Creating New Sites

A number of clients don’t have the resources it takes to create a full blown site (flash, fun, interactive, thousands of pages, etc), but fortunately, that’s not always needed in online reputation management cases.

Simple sites can be created by buying a domain (under $10/year), purchasing hosting if you don’t have it already (under $100/year in most cases – sites like Bluehost allow multiple domains to be hosted per account), and setting up a Wordpress/Joomla/Tumblr site. I’m a big fan of Wordpress since it’s easy to use, has a number of plugins that allow for you to both optimize and make your site more functional, and themes are available for free or low cost from a number of sources. I use the Thesis theme on this site because it’s easy to customize, but you can also check out some of the below sites for additional themes (both free and paid):

• Thesis
• Free Wordpress Themes
• Themes 2 WP
• iThemes
• Free Tumblr Themes
• Joomla Art

Sites I’ve created for past clients (with the use of templates) include blogs, scholarship announcement sites, job/career sites, landing pages for special promotions, mini sites for specific departments within a company, press release/pr/news contact sites, community involvement sites, employee geared sites, social media sites (here’s what we’re talking about online/here’s where we are online/etc), and industry related sites (links to resources/free information/etc).

Getting Positive Press

Positive press can be created in a few ways, but the benefit is that other sites will write about you if your news is picked up, or you can create “pages” on sites that re-publish press releases on a regular basis.

Here’s a frequently updated list of press release distribution services – some of them free online services and others are paid. Use those sites to distribute optimized press releases that announce positive news, new clients/initiatives/services, charity involvement, scholarship announcements, new hires, presentation/speaker/conference announcements, or anything else you deem newsworthy. Optimize the press release with your keyword in the title, body, and tags, then submit to the press release distribution services and include a link back to different (positive) sites that you own or want to rank high. The more links each site has from trustworthy sites, the better chance it has of ranking high.

Commenting On Other Sites

Commenting on other blogs can be useful for linkbuilding (if the site allows dofollow links), but in some cases, it can also help a site rank for your name/keyword if the comment is optimized correctly.

Before you begin creating sites and profiles as part of your online reputation management initiatives, take a step back and find sites/posts/news mentions that already mention the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

Keeping with the American Laser Centers example, I’ve decided to use them again for this post.

While negative posts may be ranking high for your name/company name/product, there may be quite a few positive mentions of your brand out there that haven’t been optimized for the keyword in question; to find them, you have to do a bit of digging.

The first step in finding positive mentions is to search the first 10 or so pages of Google, looking for positive or neutral mentions of a client’s keyword. LinkedIn company profiles that haven’t been optimized, old press releases, scholarship mentions on an .edu site, and splash pages from old promotions are all gems that can be re-purposed, optimized, and used as part of your online reputation management strategy.

Create an excel sheet of any positive mentions you find and include the PageRank, # of links to domain, and # of links to the page. You should constantly be adding results to this worksheet: since you don’t have control over the positive mentions you’re finding, you’ll need to keep in mind that some posts will be deleted/removed, won’t be optimized enough to ever outrank negative posts, or are updated to turn into negative mentions.

Tools For Finding Positive Mentions:

• Search engines
• Google News
• Steprep
• Soloseo
• Search operators
• Analytics
• Google Alerts
• Variety of online reputation management software tools (Trackur/Radian6/Brandwatch/StartPR/etc)

Tips and Tricks:

Below are a few search operators you can also use to help find positive mentions. The .edu and .gov search operators will find education or government sites that mention the keyword you are looking for. Both .edu and .gov sites tend to rank high in Google since they are (generally) trusted sites. For both the .edu and .gov search, I was able to find a plethora of links. For the .edu search, I found Alumni mentions of current American Laser Centers employees, scholarship mentions, graduation/job fair mentions, and case studies. The .gov search didn’t bring up as many positive results, but it’s always best practice to search.

The inurl and intitle search operators will bring up sites that have your keyword in the title or url of the domain, both of which will make your linkbuidling efforts more productive.

Find .edu mentions: american laser center site:.edu [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS306US306&q="american+laser+centers"+site:.edu&aq=f&oq=&aqi=]

Find .gov mentions: american laser center site:.gov [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS306US306&q="american+laser+centers"+site:.gov&aq=f&oq=&aqi=]

inurl:american laser centers [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS306US306&q=inurl:"american+laser+centers"&aq=f&oq=&aqi=]

intitle:american laser centers [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS306US306&q=intitle:"american+laser+centers"&aq=f&oq=&aqi=]

Deciding Which Mentions To Focus On First

Once you have a list of 10+ positive mentions, sort them by PageRank, whether the keyword is in the title, and how many links are pointing to the page that ranks and the domain of the site.

What to look for in posts:

• Keyword in title
• Keyword in URL
• Trusted Domain

I did a brief search for “American Laser Centers” on StepRep, Google News, and on the first 5 pages of Google to find the above 11 positive results. I also used the .edu and .gov search operators to find additional mentions. Depending on the PageRank of the results you find, whether they mention your keyword in the title, or how optimized the posts are, you may have to find many more results than 10.

Why Look For Positive Mentions?

Often times, reputation management clients come to me and assume that they need to create new web sites and landing pages and put extra money into the design and implementation of those sites in order to push down negative results. In most cases, however, you can leverage the effort that others have already put in to writing about your brand. Some of the results above, such as LinkedIn, entrepreneur.com, ltu.edu, facebook, and dailycandy can easily rank for the “American Laser Centers” keyword with the help of additional links to those pages. While owning domains related to your business and claiming profiles in your name is always a best practice to manage your online reputation and presence, positive results that have had time to age and that were created by an outside party can often rank high with a few links pointed towards them.

In the instances above, some of the positive mentions already have a fairly high PageRank, with some higher than the negative results that are currently ranking for the “American Laser Centers” keyword. By increasing the profile links from 0 to 10+ (in this case the negative results don’t have many links pointing to their pages, but in other scenarios, you may need hundreds to thousands of links to outrank a negative result), these positive mentions can most likely outrank the negative mentions.

Next Steps: Building Links To Positive Mentions

In the next few posts, we’ll focus on how to create links to already created positive mentions and explore the tools used to find those positive mentions.

If you can’t wait until the next posts, a few ways to build links to positive mentions include:

• Article Marketing
• Blog posts on sites that you own (with links to the positive mentions)
• Directories
• Profile creation
• Link wheels
• Emailing relevant sites that you think may find the link(s) useful
• Blog commenting (do-follow sites)
• Analyzing competitor links and/or sites that link to the domain already

ORM Suggestion (for those fixing negative results):

When looking for positive results that you will look to eventually push up in the rankings, keep an eye out for whether or not comments are allowed. If all of a sudden a post comes up and people that are watching you notice, they may leave negative comments on those sites.

Why is this controversial?

In most cases, I would recommend allowing open conversation, as would most social media consultants. In the case of fixing a companies online reputation management, however, I generally focus on fixing negative results and then encourage the company to be more proactive in their social media/online presence afterwards, encouraging feedback and online conversations with potential, current, and previous customers.

[Note: I am not affiliated with American Laser Centers in any way. I picked them as an example because they are a local Michigan company that I googled and – right away – saw a page full of negative results for. I have also not researched the complaints and am not aware of whether they are true or not.]

When taking on a new online reputation management client, one of my first steps is to research the actual client: their brand, current online initiatives and presence, and the background on any negative information that is posted about them.

The second step, however, is to research the actual web sites that any negative information is posted on. Are these web sites solely geared towards bringing down one company/person/product, was it a one-off post that happens to rank high, a forum posting with a number of people who chimed in, an employee/customer/client that had an unpleasant experience, or a combination of the above?

American Laser Centers: 4 Negative Results Above The Fold

I decided to use a real company in this post because it allows me to give real examples that other companies can apply to their situation. The company I chose was American Laser Centers, a laser hair removal and cellulite reduction company with headquarters in Michigan.

While this post addresses analyzing negative results, American Laser Centers first step should be to address the negative information if at all possible. In this case, it is possible. But that’s another post.

When I google the company name, “American Laser Centers,” three of the five organic results that show up above the fold on my screen are negative results, plus one negative pay-per-click result.

If I scroll down to see the organic results below the fold on my screen (I have my settings at 10 results per search term), there are two more negative results, for a total of 5 out of 10 negative results on the first page, or 50% of the first page!

Keywords

In this situation, I searched for the exact company name, “American Laser Centers,” but if you search for variations of the name, more and different negative results come up. Try “American Laser Center,” or “American Laser” and different results show up. Depending on the amount of traffic a company receives for specific keywords, branding

American Laser Centers: An Online Reputation Management Series Case Study

involved, or results showing up, each keyword should be given a different priority level. In this case, the keyword “American Laser” is also showing companies in different industries and only one negative result, so priority should be given to the first two keywords before focusing on the third.

When analyzing negative results, compile a list of keywords to analyze by coming up with a list of products and services, company nicknames, common misspellings of your company name, company name and variations, and common search terms that bring traffic to your site (via analytics).

Search Engines

In the example of American Laser Centers, I’m only focusing on the results as they appear in Google, but a quick search shows negative results (and different results) appearing in Yahoo!, and Bing. When trying to analyze or move down negative results, remember that each search engine ranks results in different ways.

PageRank/Title Tags/Links

Online Reputation Management: Page One Analysis

I’ve stuck with the results from the first page of Google in the chart above, but many companies are looking to push negative results down to at least page three. If that’s the case, you’ll want to analyze three pages deep, as well.

In the chart above, I’ve compiled the URL of the results, the PageRank (as of 11/16/2009), whether the result is positive/neutral or negative, the number of links pointing to the domain, number of links pointing to the page, and whether the keyword being searched is being used in the Title. When working with a client, I update these numbers weekly to graph any movement in both rankings, links, and the actual site. I’d want to see the number of links to positive pages increase week over week and I would want to keep a close eye on any new links to negative mentions.

While some argue the importance of PageRank and whether it will play a part in future rankings, it’s still an important factor when analyzing negative search results.  A combination of the PageRank of a site, the links to the domain of the site, and the number of links and quality of those links to the page that is ranking are all variables that determine how high a site will rank for a keyword.

In the “American Laser Centers” example, the first negative results, complaints board, only has a PageRank of 2, but the domain itself has a PageRank of 5, over 29,000 links, and 24 links pointing to that page alone.

I looked at the search results on Google, a search engine that tends to rank sites based on the quantity and quality of links that are pointing to a site, as well as the anchor text, and finally, PageRank. In the results above, I can see that Inc.com could be raised a bit higher if a few links were to be pointed at that page. By analyzing the Title Tags, links, and link quality of each of the negative results that appear on page 1 for your keyword, you can determine how hard it will be to outrank them, what they have done to rank so high, and a general outlook of what kind of work you’ll need to do. With 5 negative results, American Laser Centers will be looking at a few months, minimum, to push down the negative results and move up and/or create positive results, but it can be done.

Once you pinpoint the negative results that appear for your keyword, you can drill down to each result and further analyze:

1. Links pointing to negative result:
   1. How many links are pointing to the page that is ranking? Analyze the link quality of each link pointing that page: PageRank, anchor text used in link, context of post pointing to page
2. On-site optimization of negative result(s): Is the keyword you are analyzing in the title tag or used frequently in the negative post? Have they made use of internal linking, keywords in category/tags pages, in Alt tags, or are they doing any blackhat techniques (when a site is out to get you, opposed to the one-time post that unfortunately ranks high, you may have to do more research into their techniques)?
3. Are the negative results that are ranking dormant or active?

Analyzing the basics (links, titles, PageRank) of negative results will help to give you a better idea of where to start with your online reputation management initiatives, but it will take a well thought out plan to actually see movement.

In the upcoming posts, I’ll go into detail about the tools you can use to analyze results, what efforts can be made to address negative results, how to find positive mentions of your brand/keyword, how to create positive mentions, and how to push positive mentions up in the rankings.