Online Reputation Management Tips To Help With Your Job Search

Online Reputation Management lands jobs. For good or bad, what you say, do and write can and will affect your reputation. That is why it is so important to make sure you manage your online reputation. It is a direct reflection of your personal brand. Just like a corporate brand, this is how and what people think of you. Reverse SEO for online reputation management, essentially online brand management of your name, can help emphasize your positive and hide away the negative.

We all make mistakes. Maybe you posted a photo you wished you hadn’t, or had a heated disagreement about politics on Facebook that, in the light of morning, was over the top. Unfortunately, the Internet never forgets, and while you can try to delete that information, it is often stored in a search engine's cache, and can be found later through basic searches.

This is really important for job seekers. Over 75% of HR professionals have reported hiring decisions being positively influenced by a candidate’s online reputation; conversely, 60% of human resource professionals have rejected a candidate for negative online information. Silly Facebook pictures, an offensive comment, or even someone else who posted negative or incorrect information about you are not worth losing your dream job. Reverse SEO will help you hide the negative and accentuate the positive.

Online reputation management is becoming so important that some universities are even providing seniors with a six-month subscription to an online reputation management service, and helping them overcome their negative online content. By using reverse SEO we can produce more content that will distract away from any negative online slip up’s.

Here are three reverse SEO tips to help with your job search:

1. Buy your name as a domain name, and post a single page that serves almost as a resume. Use it to point to your other positive content, like a blog, your LinkedIn profile, or a YouTube channel. If you share a name with someone else more famous, or have more than a few negative content problems, you need to make sure you buy the name you want to be known by professionally. — maybe your full name (William Smith, not Bill Smith), or first, middle, and last (William Henry Smith).
2. Sign up for several social networks with your "professional" name. Get your vanity URL (a URL that includes your name) on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks, as well as blogging platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger.com.
3. Make sure you're putting positive content on your networks. It's not enough to just create the networks. You have to give the search engines something to index. The more content you create, the more the search engines have to index. As you create more new stuff, the search engines will push down the old stuff off the front pages, and out of sight of the hiring managers and HR professionals.

Reverse SEO is not a miracle maker, but it can definitely help. Negative search engine results will not completely be deleted, but they will most definitely be hidden. 89% of search engine activity is proven to derive from the first page of a search engine anyways. If you can push bad information further down on a search engine, you can eliminate any bad online reputation that may damage perception of your personal brand.