If you sell services or products online, you can list them in comparison shopping websites, or “shopping engines” like Shopping.com. This will add at least one good listing to your searchresults per service that you list with. You only have to list one product per shopping engine to start.

Because search engines still consider a page’s number of relevant backlinks to be a valid indicator of quality and relevance to a search term you should consider listing in these directories.  Octopedia, WorldSiteIndex and Microsoft’s Small Business Directory are a few examples of solid directories that allow you to link to deeper pages of your own site, like your About Us page, to help raise their rankings for your company name.

Post An E-Help Wanted Sign that will show on search results. Leverage the strength of sites like Craigslist.org to post an offering from your company for a current job offering. Make sure you use your company name first in the posting headline, this will ensure the title tag for that page is optimized, which is very helpful for SEO. And make sure to describe your company in the ad, repeating your name three or four times.

Many SEO experts recommend setting up an account with Google Alerts (free) which monitors the top 50 results, or with Google Alert, a professional tracking system that will monitor the top 200 results for you for as little as $4.95/month. You will be notified daily when new references to your name have been found in Google.

How long will it take to get all positive search engine results to show in the top 40?  That will vary, and it won’t happen overnight. You can manage your reputation with effort and patience.  It might take a few months to a year. Monitoring for your strategy will be a long-term activity. As new pages are being added daily to the Web, search results for your name can fluctuate daily, even hourly. - - And remember to be a “good guy” in the neighborhood.

The Mr. Rogers of Templates,
Arthur Browning