Among the factors to consider when planning your Internet marketing goals is reputation management. As you're building your company's online presence, you're invariably going to try a variety of marketing techniques and unfortunately, reputation management is all too often a dismissed component of your strategy. Usually until it is too late and something negative about your business is already online and you're scrambling to do damage control. In the long run, being proactive about managing your online reputation will pay big dividends.

If you haven't thought about reputation management to this point, then you might be wondering exactly what it is, how you use it, and how it fits with your SEO practices and current business initiatives. Let's start at the beginning.

Your good name is all you really have in this world. Reputation management is the practice of caring for and protecting your business' reputation and good name. You know you're a good company; you want and need the rest of the world to know this. After putting in the work to build up your online reputation, failure to properly manage your online reputation can result in losing it at the speed of a mouse click.

Fortunately, by reading this article, making a plan, and making the conscious decision to pay attention to your online reputation, you can avoid the difficult and time-consuming process of dealing with the results of a damaging comment or review. Ignoring the importance of online reputation management will find you in the unenviable position of having to mitigate the impact and then rebuild the trust you once had with your customers.

The effort you put into building and maintaining a positive reputation is a worthy investment of your time; after spending thousands of hours making your online presence known, getting your name out there and building brand recognition and trust, you want to shield the efforts of your work from slanderous remarks. Numerous websites exist specifically to help you build, maintain, and manage your reputation.

SEO and online reputation management really do go hand in hand. You can dominate the search engines like Google when your business is visible up thanks to ratings, links, and boosted PageRank resulting from links to and from authoritative sites. Higher results in the search engines with genuinely positive reviews, comments, and discussions about your business mean more traffic to your site and greater market share.

Taking the first steps to think about online reputation management, decide on a strategy and use some of the basic information discussed means your online presence and reputation will be an important part of your strategic online marketing plan.

Jennifer Greenfield writes articles on public relations and online reputation management strategies. Visit www.reprepair.com to learn how RepRepair helps individuals, businesses, and brands repair and restore their online reputation.