While companies often spend thousands of dollars to optimize their websites, design their websites, and develop a great online presence, businesses are often reluctant to hire online reputation monitoring services. This can be a problem. There are many reasons why you might want to turn to a service for internet reputation monitoring:

Professionals can monitor the Internet more effectively. Some companies assume that they can monitor their company’s reputation effectively on their own. Unfortunately, in many cases these companies assume that monitoring only requires an occasional Google search. The results of this sort of monitoring are very incomplete and can give …

Defending your company against a bad search engine reputation begins with having a good business and reputation strategy. You can help guarantee that you develop both by ensuring that you:

Have a branding strategy. It is not enough to simply want a good online reputation – you need to define exactly what you want your company to stand for. It is hard for you to develop a great reputation online if you are not sure what your business represents. What would be the best possible positive comment about your business? What image would best allow you to get the business results …

If your company reputation has suffered from unflattering online comments, you may be in need of a reputation makeover. Getting a fresh start and a new image isn’t as hard as you might believe. You can accomplish a quick overhaul by starting with a few basic questions:

1) Who are your customers? Knowing who your customers are allows you to focus on the most damaging comments online. For example, if most of your customers are over 30 and most of the negative comments about your company are posted on sites aimed at pre-teens, you may not have as much to worry …

Bad online reputation analysis allows your company to learn about negative comments being made about your business on blogs, websites, message boards, social networking pages, and in mainstream news sources. This allows you to gather comprehensive information about the way that your brand is portrayed online.

Bad online reputation analysis is the first step to gaining control over your online reputation. You simply cannot get control over your online brand image until you know what is being said about your company, your top team members, and your products or services on the Internet. Once you understand the comments being made and …

Bad press online can harm your reputation more than you think. In many ways, the Internet is like a small village, where gossip and news spreads fast and is remembered for a long time. If you do business in a small town, you may instinctively understand the stakes. If your local small-town paper prints some negative news about your business, everyone will know it and will remember it. The Internet works the same way, but damage control can be more complicated, because gossip and negative press on the Internet does not usually go away organically. Plus, it can easily go …

In today’s world, where just about anyone can set up a free blog in minutes, negative blog articles can be a real problem for companies. A disgruntled customer can easily write up an article that negatively depicts your company and publish it almost instantly on a blog. Competitors, too, can depict your company in a less-than-flattering light in an article that gets published all over the Internet. If your company is being negatively depicted in blogs, there are many things that you can do:

Monitor blogs. Monitoring blogs in your industry as well as personal blogs can help you determine whether …

What happens when you search for your business name, company products and services, or employee and owner names on major search engines such as Google? Are most of the top results positive endorsements of your company or your official web sites? Or, are some of the top results negative comments coming from disgruntled customers, former employees, and competitors?

If your search engine results are not excellent, you do need to clean them up. Search engine results can affect your bottom line, because:

Many people use the Internet as a primary form of information before deciding which companies to do business with. A …

Even a few years ago, no one was especially worried about the way that their personal name was being used on the Internet. While it may have been amusing to look up a name on Google or another major search engine, the actual results did not seem to matter very much. Today, a number of high-profile cases have changed all that. There are media reports, seemingly every month, about who are losing job opportunities because of their personal name search engine results. Some people’s reputations and professional lives are in peril or even ruined by a bad search engine result …

The way that your personal name appears on search engine rankings is your new business card, résumé, and handshake rolled into one. While in the past, people had to run a background check to find out all about you, today anyone with even a little bit of computer savvy can easily find out all about you online with just a few clicks of a mouse. If search engine results for your personal name are not good, it could be costing you that great apartment, promotion, new job, or even a volunteer position. If your personal name results in bad Internet …

If you own your own business, what sort of results do you get when running your CEOs’ names in the search engines? When you run your CEOs’ names through search engine such as Google, are the top results generally positive or generally negative? Unfortunately, sometimes a CEOs personal decisions, not to mention their business decisions, can create a backlash against that one person. Since your CEOs are almost always linked to your company, though, negative search results for your CEOs mean negative search results for your company.

Many companies worry about interfering with the way that CEO names appear in …