Protect your online reputation

Your company may have the best reputation with its customers and suppliers in real life, you also have to protect that reputation online. You wouldn’t want the Internet user to be immediately confronted with a few articles that give your company a bad name when he looks it up in a search engine, would you? Therefore, there are several SEO companies that offer a separate service nowadays, called Search Engine Reputation Management. However, with a few nifty tools, you can already do a lot yourself to protect your company’s reputation online.

Firstly, there are of course our trusted search engines (Google, Bing & Co), where you can simply enter the name of your company and look what people are writing about you. If you enter your domain name as a keyword (www.mycompany.com), you will also immediately find out who has posted links to your company. You can achieve a similar result with the syntax link:yourcompany.com in Google or other search engines. Also, make sure to take a peek at Google Images in order to check which images appear when one performs a search on your company name.

Another very handy Google tool is Google Alerts. If you create an alert concerning the name of your company, you will get an e-mail every day or week (depending on your preferences) that lists the websites that mention your company. When you create the alert, you can specify if you want Google to check the entire web or only news, blogs, video, newsgroups, etc.

And don’t forget the blogs; they often respond to communications very quickly and a negative thread regarding your company can severely damage your reputation. Check Technorati and Bloglines, two sites that are specialized in blog searches. With Tagbulb , you can search the tags that Internet users have added to their posts in blogs, their videos, their images, etc.

Don’t forget to also check the social media. What do people say about your company on Facebook? Are there employees who are a bit too talkative on their profile page on matters related to your company? And don’t forget Twitter ; it is advisable to regularly check this microblogging site in order to find out if people are not leaving negative comments regarding your company.