SEO And Reputation Management Often Intersect On Your Website

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

A caller wanted to know how he could push down a Ripoff Report listing in the search engine rankings for his company name. I don’t know if he knew that report also ranked for his personal name. He never mentioned it.

In fact, Google his personal name and all you’d see is the Ripoff Report review of his employee management skills. “Can I have that pushed down in the rankings?” he asked.

The answer also Yes, of course. How much money do you want to spend and how long do you want to take? Those are the most logical questions. There is more to think about than just pushing down a negative comment. In order to do that you have to “push up” something else. A quick survey of the situation revealed the following about his website:

He needed meta tags on every page
Several internal pages had no content, only photos (without alt tags)
Inbound links were limited
He had no blog
Multiple CSS files (unnecessary ones at that) were slowing down his load time, which affects your Google quality score and search rankings

In a word, this gentleman needed help, and fast. Here’s what we recommended:

Add meta tags to every page
Add 50-60 word descriptions for all his photos, make them thumbnails that open in a larger window with a click, and give them alt tags
Do some link building
Add a blog to the site and write to it every day
Do some code cleanup and consolidate the CSS files

When it comes to reputation management for small businesses in a small town, the best place to start is with SEOing your own website. Make sure your website is the absolute best that it can be then guage the situation to see what happens after you’ve made the changes. Target the right keywords and you can push down those negative reputation killers. But it takes time, sometimes takes a lot of money, and always takes a lot of patience. How much do you really it want done?