The lack of detailed regulation for companies operating on the web has highlighted a number of problems. One of these is protecting the brand of your company against copying, distortion or libel.

If your company is selling products online, your first priority is to create trust between your target consumer and your brand. If you already have an established offline brand, then you can be sure that your existing and potential customers will use that brand name to search for your products. They will expect to find your name at the top, or very near the top of the search engine ranking pages. If this doesn't happen, because someone is using your brand name for something else, then you risk losing your customers and that will impact your profit and loss account.

There are celebrated cases where the anti-brand sites rank higher than the legitimate brands. A classic example is McDonald's, where a search will reveal not only the company's home site, but several others attacking its position on worker and animal rights. Because search results are returned based on their relevancy to the terms searched for, this is almost impossible to control. A protest site which is rich in content, and cleverly optimised, may rise above you in the rankings; search engines have no respect for market position.

As far as search engine marketing is concerned, protecting your corporate brand is a key part of the strategy. Whilst there is no absolute way to ensure that your brand isn't corrupted by a third party, you could use a combination of natural search marketing, and pay-per-click strategies to help. If you are running a pay-per-click strategy with Google, you can register any relevant trademarks, thereby preventing competitors from bidding on those search terms.

The key is to keep a careful eye on your rankings position. Regular monitoring of your position and of the sites that come up when you search under your key terms will give you a good idea as to what you need to do to keep your site relevant and near or at the top of the rankings page. Monitoring can also highlight practices by the search engines that you feel may be detrimental to your rankings, and you or your advisers should speak directly to the search engine to see if you can resolve the issues. A good search engine optimisation company will help you with this, and together you can devise an online corporate branding strategy that protects your business.

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