Whether you might be in the job market three years from now or you are running a consultancy or small business, your name is gold. Or it's mud. That all depends on you.

A potential employer need only to pop into Google or Yahoo to find your name or your business name, and in an instant they know all the sordid things that others have to say about you. Or they will discover how sweet you really are.

The first step in managing your online reputation is to be your reputation. If you want to be known as honest, as credible, as reliable, it helps to be all those things. But even with your best efforts, not everybody will love you for who you are.

So what happens when the third ranked web page for your name is a rant against you? Or what about if you share a name with other people who occupy most of the top 10 spots?

Fortunately, I don't have to contend with nastiness, but "David Leonhardt" is also a famous Jazz singer and a popular New York Times reporter. As of writing this, Google's results for David Leonhardt give my EzineArticles profile a 3, my happiness website 7 and 8, and my blog a 10. Yahoo doesn't like me as much, and MSN loves my LinkedIn profile at 2 and my happiness website at 8.

SEO for Online Reputation Management:

There is nothing you can do to pull down other websites in the top 10. So if you want to remove a web page that sits in third position, you will need to promote eight other pages to surpass it. Here are a few tips to do just that:

1. Make sure your own website comes up first. If you have more than one website, first and second is even better. This is plain old traditional SEO for your own name.
2. Maximize the reach of your website(s); optimize two pages on each website for your name. One page might be your bio another might be quotes by you or testimonials for you.
3. Analyze those positive web pages already in the top 20 for your name and determine which ones could have an extra page optimized for your name. Then contact the owners and ask them to make a couple minor adjustments.
4. Analyze which positive web pages are already in the top 20 and determine which could be pushed above any negative pages through changes to the pages or through link-building. And start building those links.
5. Analyze those neutral web pages already in the top 20 for your name and determine which ones could be made positive. It might mean getting friends and clients to add information.
6. Analyze those negative web pages already in the top 20 for your name and determine which ones could be made positive. Another place to solicit outside help.
7. Create, optimize and promote profile pages at popular user-generated content websites, such as Squidoo, MySpace and StumbleUpon. And for MSN, LinkedIn obviously works well, too.
8. Create blogs in your name. If your main SEO goal is how your name or business name comes up in the search engine, host your blog at BlogSpot and/or WordPress and make sure your name is part of the title of your blog, as I have done with David Leonhardt's SEO Marketing Express.

Those are my top SEO tips for reputation management. You cannot control very much of what other sites do, but what you can control, you should. And you certainly can help the rankings of friendly web pages that show people what a darling you truly are. Your online reputation management is in your hands.