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 search engine results. After all, they reason that names are personal, and it is true that some CEOs get touchy when someone suggests that their names are not getting positive search engine results. However, you should be monitoring CEO names to ensure that they produce positive search engine results for number of reasons:

1. CEO names are a business brand as much as your company name, or your product name or service name. While a name is a private entity, for public individuals such as CEOs, names are very public. They are personal brands, but they also become links with a company brand. A CEO is often linked in the same sentence with your company. Therefore, CEO who is a philanthropist and is involved in charity work in the community will bring positive comments about your company, while a CEO associated with scandal will bring negative comments about your company.
2. CEO names get linked to your company in specific ways. For example, if your CEO, John Smith, does something that causes egative publicity while with your company, your company will forever be affected by the scandal. Let’s assume that John Smith moves onto a lucrative new career after overcoming the scandal. Years from now, long after the scandal has been dealt with, the scandal will continue to be linked with your company temporally, if in no other way. That is, newspapers will continue to write “John Smith, while CEO of Your Company, was involved in a spending scandal that almost ended his career…” Pretty soon, your company name and the scandal caused by one CEO will be linked in potential customers’ minds. Plus, the new referrals to the scandal will mean that the scandal will continue to be associated with your company name and your former CEO for years to come.
3. Once you or company name is linked to a CEO’s name which in turn is linked to something negative, that association will stay on the Internet forever. Simply firing your CEO or having him or her switch jobs will not help. Archived web pages will still maintain that association for Internet users. Therefore, you need to take proactive steps to ensure that the underlying problem of a bad reputation is dealt with upfront. You don’t want to be paying for CEO’s mistakes years from now.

If your company name garners bad results on search engine searches, you need to step in and change your online reputation around. Your company name is a valuable asset and the backbone of your marketing and branding strategy. When it becomes tarnished, it is no exaggeration to say that your company’s future could be in danger. To repair a bad search result for your company name:

1. Send out good press releases. By “good” we mean well written and actually newsworthy – do not just send out quick press releases that explain the services or products your business offers. Press releases can induce the media to contact you. Plus, if you use free online PR networks, your press releases are fully searchable by search engines and can improve search engine results for your company name.
2. Set up a blog – or more than one blog – using the company name in both the title and the blog URL. Update frequently with short posts and be sure to set up a few separate pages that include an “About Us” and a mission statement.
3. Build HubPages and Squidoo lenses, using the company name in the title and URL. Both HubPages and Squidoo are nice because they do not require frequent updates, the way that blogs do. Spend a few hours up setting up your pages and you can enjoy better search results with no further effort.
4. Set up pages on networking and social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace. The pages get indexed quickly and rise up search results quickly, replacing older, negative pages about your company. As an added bonus, you can create links to your LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace pages from your web site, creating more traffic for both your web site and your social media sites.
5. Link all your lenses, blogs, web sites, and profiles together. Every time you create a new spot online, link to all your blogs and sites on it, and update your blogs and websites so that they link to your new spot online. This helps ensure that all the pages you create are indexed by search engine spiders quickly. This ensures that all these online spots show up on search results.
6. Create a custom RSS feed for your company name. Use Google news alerts and the Yahoo! News tool to keep alerted about any negative stories about your company name. Get a Technorati feed to monitor the blogs for any mentions of your company name. This lets you note potential problems – and respond to them – fast.
7. Look out for calls for guest bloggers and offer articles for guest blogger spots. This is a great way to ensure that your name gets on high traffic blogs. Make sure that your article will link back to your blog or company web site.
8. Find positive mentions of your company name online and link to these testimonials from your blogs, lenses, web sites, and social networking sites. Be sure to send the writer or blogger of kind mentions a thank you note or email.