One of the most important things you can do online is engage in some sort of scan for online reputation management. If you do not it is amazing what some dirtbags and douchebags can try to do to you.

So what do I mean by reputation management. Simply put it is keeping track across the web on an ongoing basis of things that are being said,written or referred to in others posts that mention you or your brand. . With the rise of the ability for anyone to post content it is possible for someone with an axe to grind to place an item higher in the SERP’s than yours that makes you look bad. Politicians and businesses have to also have a bit of a thick skin because overresponse sometimes gives more publicity to the inaccurate or opinion comments than they deserve. One has to respond factually where appropriate, when untrue allegations are made. As your business reputation is built on” know, like and trust” you have to project and reflect on what is being said.

One method is to post content not in rebuttal to the slagging you may be taking by unhappy readers,contrarian opinions or just malicious comment but to highlight what you believe are your strongest reputation factors, including posts by others who are your supporters and fans. You will often be surprised pleasantly from quarters that you might not expect in coming to your aid.

One tool that you can use to scan constantly are Google Alerts. You set up the alert whenever your name, brand or business appears in a search listing and you will get a message from Google automatically, on a schedule that you select, reporting on the keywords your alert query is based on and outlining the link and content.

I use Socialmention.com to do a scan also.Social Mention aggregates data from the web and a variety of social media sites and allows you to set up alerts as well as post a widget on your site when your terms appear.. Another site is MonitorThis,which allows you to search over 23 engines for items. Google Blogs allows for searching on blogs and another site called LookupPage allows you to setup a profile page of your own for your business or self.

For your info there is a good article by Alyssa Gregory on Sitepoint.com outlining more tools.