You may have spent many years building up a strong reputation for your business, then you notice a negative comment on the internet that has tarnashed your hard fought reputation. It only takes one or two negative comments to detract business from your site and punish your brand.

This negative comment can come in many forms, from a negative review for one of your products, or a blog from a old disgruntled employee, it could even be from your competitors trying to gain the upper hand on the internet and snatch your customers. These negative comments work their way to the top of the search engine rankings in a variety of different ways including:

• They cause up a stir and hence attract links
• They are submitted to social networking sites
• The blog catches on and people blog about the same topic
• The blog makes to way onto Twitter, and people retweet it
• Word of mouth makes the blog spread fast

On the modern internet one bad post can spread like wildfire, fortunately there are ways to try to improve your online reputation, one of these methods is to use clever search engine optimisation techniques. Below I have listed some tips and tricks to help you push down these negative comments down the SERPs using advanced SEO techniques.

Firstly you need to examine which keywords ared leading to negative press in the SERPS, the keyword could be your company or brand name, it could be a particular product. The idea is to find the keyword that has lead to a negative comment before launching an SEO attack to resolve it. Once you have your keyword(s) you want to drive friendly results up the SERPs pushing the negative press down, but how can you do this?

Firstly you should look at the top 20 results in the rankings for the keyword, you will probably find that you have many listings already in the top 20. You should look at pushing these pages first. The next thing to look for other sites which you can utilise to own more shelf space in the SERPs, these include:

• Create Social Networking Profiles – If the keyword with bad reputation is your brand name you should create social networking profiles using your brand name. For example you should obtain facebook, linkedin and twitter accounts using your brand name. You should ensure that your account is regularly updated with unique content, this will push the profile up the rankings
• Create a useful subdomain – You could create a subdomain away from your main domain that contains news and information different to your main site.
• News Sites – Do you have any news sites on a similar topic away from your site. If you do you may wish to build these sites with useful content around your brand
• Coroprate Sites – Do you have another corporate site away from your main site? This would be a great site to push up the rankings as they are already associated with your brand

Now you have a list of sites to push, you simply need to promote these sites for the search terms you have found negative press about. Here are some tips below on how to do this

• Content – Add content regularly around the sites you wish to push, try to ensure to use the required keyword where you can, and where it appears naturally
• Press Releases – You should create press releases for the selection of sites and embed links within the articles. You should embed links with the appropriate anchor text.
• Use sub-domains – Link your main site to an appropriate corporate subdomain using your keyword. Make sure the links are embedded near your brand name
• Link Building – Most of the negative press would have built their way to the top of the SERPs through link building, you should post some useful positive press around your brand and link to this. This could be achieved by writing on an external blog on your corporate blog and linking to this using the keyword.

If the bad press is not legitimate then you should email the webmaster and ask them to remove the non legitimate post, you may however have to submit proof that the post is slander.

To conclude reputation management using SEO involves the following:

• Research the keywords which are tarnishing you reputation
• Find sites that you can push up the listings
• Utilise social media websites to push your brand
• Update content on these sites as regularly as you can
• Build links and press releases to these sites using appropriate keywords

There are more tactics to help your online reputation, but if you follow the above tactics you should be well on your way. Your company should take online reputation very seriously, its amazing how quick bad publicity can spread around the internet and harm your business.

You should manage your online reputation carefully. A good tip would be to document the actions you have performed and how this has affected your listings over time, this will give you a great idea as to which sites and tactics and working for you. If you have anything else to comment on reputation management please add a comment.