The idea behind reputation management is to control what results are displayed in Google for your company or domain search. If you have a real business it can be quite easy to control the first five results - in most cases this will push anything else about you posted on other sites below the fold.
There is however a caveat: if your company has had a lot of bad press for something quite specific that has resulted in articles in national newspapers it is unlikely that you will ever bury these. Basic reputation management works well when people have been complaining about you on forums or lesser known blogs.
Build Your Profiles
Most companies will have a Facebook page. The Facebook page need to be the name of your company. On Facebook you can control what is posted on the page however this can lead to frustrating user engagement. But if the page is about protecting your brand it is best that all comment are moderated.
Link to your Facebook page from your own website. In most cases this will be more than enough for the Facebook page to appear in the second position behind your company in the search results. Make sure the links from your website to any company profiles are do follow links.
Follow the same method for Google+ and twitter. When setting up Google plus it has to be in a personal name and then you add a company page. On Twitter you need to set the user name as your company name.
LinkedIn Company Pages
The relatively new
LinkedIn company page is a must for any business. However you need an email address to ties in with the domain name that is going to be the company name. Set up this page and add as much information as possible about your company. As with all social sites I advise against copying any text directly from your own site to use on any other site. I see so many companies that appear as if they can’t be bothered to fill out their profile and just copy paste their
about us page. Take the 15 or 20 minutes and do it right.
Promoting the Pages
All these social pages should be linked to from your company site. If you really don’t want to use social media much bury the links in the footer of the page and use only text to link and not images.
If after two to four week the above sites are not in the front page of Google you have a bit more work ahead. This work is worthwhile anyway to protect your position.
Links from websites are as useful for promoting these sites as they are for promoting your own website. However the links to these sites can be of a much lower quality and can use as much anchor text as you like.
Interlink all the social pages then use other website where you can add social profiles like forums and blogs. Create a page on
about.me and link to all from here, same for wordpress.com - all you need is a one page blog and share that one page on a Google+ page to get it indexed.
I strongly suggest methods that can be used for promoting social pages never be used for promoting your own site as you are likely to fall foul of Google.
Leslie runs
CubeOnlineMarketing.com a search optimisation company based in Ireland.
William
