Online Reputation Management: Part 3 - 10 Ways to Bury the Bad Stuff - Get more referrals by talking to us!

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In Part 1 and Part 2, we shared tips and solutions to take control of your online brand. In Part 3, we continue revealing ways to bury negative search results on search engines:

6. If you really want to take advantage of getting your name and fresh content out there on the Internet:

Ask others if you can guest blog.

Post on other people’s blogs for them or co-author with someone else.

Recommended Authors is there to help find others for potential co-authoring. By co-authoring or quoting somebody in an article, they can distribute your article or co-authored article to their network, and you to yours.

It does nothing but help both parties with search engine optimization, as well as and more importantly, being able to commingle, if you will, each of your mailing lists and social media circles.

7. Post rich media – as much as you can.

This includes, YouTube, SlideShare, or any type of site that hosts pictures and videos. I won’t go on the record to say that all forms of rich media are indexed faster than text, but they rank pretty high. If you give presentations and have PowerPoints to share, create a free account and share them on SlideShare.net.

If you are comfortable recording yourself, record a video and upload it to YouTube. Make sure they are made and tagged well. Even if you are not recording yourself, it’s easy to convert a PowerPoint into a video and do a voice-over. What a lot of people are doing is transcribing the audio that’s on the video and adding it to the description, and don’t forget to link back to your website.

All of these approaches help with Search Engine Optimization.

8. Do a video blog. If you go to the trouble to do a video, embed it into a blog post with a text introduction. That way, when you are syndicating out to LinkedIn and through your email list, you’re syndicating that content as well.

9. Take control – and own your own online domain before someone else does. If you don’t own your own domain – firstname lastname.com – you should. Domains are very affordable, as cheap as $7.99 a year.

If someone were to buy your domain and post derogatory content about you, there would be nothing you could do about it. If your name is not available, try adding a dash or middle initial/name, or, for example, if you are a personal injury lawyer in Manhattan, you could try to buy personalinjurymanhattan.com, or .org, or .net. This is a situation where you want to be proactive.

10. Do brand monitoring. You can manage what search results are coming up on you by getting a Google alert for your name. These are free, and any time your name comes up in a Google search, Google will send you an email summary of where, what the link was, and what is said. There is no limit to how many alerts you can set up.

Positive online content about yourself can be in many forms. What other ways have you discovered for improving your online reputation?