This week on SEOMOZ.org, Rand Fishkin and company discussed reputation management in a couple of posts as it pertains to SEO (search engine optimization) strategies.  First, I should note that to many experts in the search marketing industry, SEO is a term that describes a much broader set of goals rather than just optimizing content for search; rather it’s a whole philosophy for web design and marketing that balances search, user experience and brand perception.

In a post called “The 6 Goals of SEO: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Business“, he lists SEO for reputation management as one of the goals.  First he explains what SEO for reputation management means – basically it involves trying to get positive comments about you or your company ranked in search engines above any negative comments.  I should add, for people that generally have positive information about them online, it involves getting the most relevant and desired references ranking as high as possible.

This can be a challenging process and the obvious need in this work is the ability to save and categorize online references about you.  This is a simple but important feature that we’ve added to our reputation manager (StepRep).  Today, you can set up Google Alerts, but you have no way to save or categorize results in an organized way.  Placing the valuable references on your StepRep profile, helps provide crawlable links to those references and thus helps to promote them in search.