Reputation Management is one of the most important components with maintaining a website. From small web-based businesses, to nationally recognized companies, their online reputation can influence many buyers. It is therefore extremely critical to properly manage your businesses online reputation. With the advent of the internet and its abilities to reach everywhere in the world, buyers can comment and post on their experience or offer a statement on your products. It can take a matter of minutes for your world-renowned company to go from the top of the charts to the bottom.

“People post comments about businesses all of the time and therefore requires webmasters to pay close attention to their online reputation,” says Kenneth C. Wisnefski, Founder and CEO of WebiMax. “At WebiMax, our team of experts devote many hours each day to monitor and maintain the online reputation of clients. The peace of mind that our clients receive from us is the standard we exhibit that is not billed to them on any contract.”

Michael Stricker, an expert in SEO and Social Media Strategy, offers the following 4 tips:

4. Reply once and only once to a negative remark to offer contacts and move that conversation off-line, otherwise you'll just be making the negative comment more popular and hastening its climb in the SERPs.

3. Build a defensive wall around your brand made of good reviews and ratings so that the one bad one hardly makes a dent in your star ratings. It is the ounce of prevention that is worth the pound of cure (a costly reputation management campaign) to push the negative matters down and out of sight, out of mind.

2. Initiate some form of monitoring. Right now, Google Alerts is free. Start watching the online conversation. You'll have, at most 24-48 hours to respond to a complaint before that complainer gets hardening of the categories and hates you forever.

1. Count to ten before responding!

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