Today, the most common method to find out more about a company is to do a Google search, and evaluate the results. Due to the way Google ranks websites many companies are plagued with negative forum posts, articles and other uncomplimentary content about their business.

The goal of online reputation management is to help companies clean up their top ten rankings by performing search engine optimization (SEO) on websites that are positive to the business, which in turn push the negative sites down, and out of the top ten rankings.

Many negative posts for a company's brand come through forums. One of the worst things you can do is to constantly write rebuttals against these negative posts. Every time you access a negative site and post a comment you're giving them more content that the searches engines quickly discover -- and in turn this will help the negative rise in the search engine rankings. It can be very difficult, but resist the temptation to fight back.