There are literally thousands of social networking websites, many of which offer very specific categories as well as broad networks that are used by anybody that wants to make new contacts on the Internet.

There are those sites that are used primarily for social purposes, making friends and catching up with existing friends, and there are also social networking sites for professionals (LinkedIn is the most popular example of this kind of site).

Anybody is able to post virtually anything on these sites for the world to see. Include blogs, groups, directories, and review sites and there are many tens of thousands of places where your customers, employees, and even employers are able to post their opinion on you or your business.

When a lead or a potential client searches for you it is usually these results that they will see first. For this reason, it’s important that you do everything you can to ensure that the most prominent results are the pages that you would like to be seen.

With so many sites and opportunities for bad press, it would be impossible to check every site manually. Fortunately, searching is what the search engines are best used for.

For an instant snapshot of your current reputation, you can enter your name in Google or Yahoo. You can try the same with your business name or your website name. You can even add the names of executives in your company in order to find out what people think of you and, more importantly, what others are reading about you when they research your name online.

Alternatively, adding your chosen keywords to MonitorThis lets you keep on top of all the results from 20 search engines and social search sites. What’s more, it’s free to use.