Concerned about your online reputation? Don’t have money to hire an expensive reputation-management firm? Relax. You can implement strategies on your own to enhance how prospects and clients perceive you.

At the National Ethics Association, we believe in running the most ethical and operationally excellent business possible. That is the ultimate way to build a strong reputation. And this isn’t something you do in a day, a week, or even a month. Building reputation the old fashioned way depends on making the right choices in every area of your business month after month, year after year.

But once you commit to doing so, there are some easy and practical steps you can take to better protect and grow your reputation online. Here are four of them:

1. Take control of your identity. First thing to do: Control the use of your identity on the Internet. That means setting up accounts in your business name (or your personal name) on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, and Naymz. Why go through the bother of setting up accounts you have no plans to use? Because this prevents a competitor or disgruntled customer from doing so and using them to launch a smear campaign. Since there are hundreds of potential sites out there, doing this even for only the top sites will be tedious. Fortunately, KnowEm.com will check the major social networking sites for you and tell you which sites are still available. Then for an additional fee, it can claim your name on all those sites.

2. Track what people are saying about you online. Your best resource: Google Alerts. This service is great for tracking mentions on the web, news, blogs, video, and groups. But don’t just search for your personal name. Also request alerts for product names, brand names, and names of key employees. By clicking on all five Google Alert options, it will search everything for you. Also consider using the free Google Reader service. Just ask Google to send your alert as an RSS feed to Google Reader, which displays them beautifully. Also consider saving searches on Yahoo Alerts and Twitter and running them on Technorati (for blogs) and Monitor This (for multiple search engines). You can also search discussion boards (Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, for instance) with boardtracker.com.

3. Start growing your online reputation. Your two main options are thought-leadership publishing and social network engagement. For the first, make sure your web site is stocked with well-written content that conveys your professional strengths, all properly seeded with your name (be consistent) and desired search-engine terms. Also consider sharing your insights in a company newsletter, blog, or podcast. You can also repurpose much of your content on industry publications and blogs. Other avenues for establishing your authority include hosting a meet up (on Meetup.com), answering questions on Yahoo.com and LinkedIn, hosting a special event, issuing press releases, and posting a video on YouTube. But don’t stop there. A big part of enhancing your reputation is not just publishing content, but also engaging with people on your industry’s social networks, forums, and groups. Strive to be polite and helpful at all times on such groups, and never spam members with overtly promotional content.

4. Respond appropriately to online criticism. If you have an online presence, it will only be a matter of time before someone attacks your reputation. The best way to respond: Acknowledge the negative comment as quickly as possible. Then research the situation to determine if the claim is true or false. If it’s true, apologize and offer to rectify the problem offline. If the negative comment is out of proportion or unbalanced, feel free to put it in its proper context. However, if the comment is false, ask the site owner to retract or remove it. If the site owner doesn’t respond, be sure to correct the attack in the article’s, review’s, or post’s comment section.

The whole field of online reputation management can be complex. And there is a lot riding on maintaining a sterling professional reputation. So if you come under serious attack, it may be time to call in a reputation-management expert. But for the vast majority of firms, the above four strategies will suffice.

Finally, never forget that your reputation will only reflect the underlying nature of your business. If you strive to be ethically and operationally excellent, your reputation will be excellent, too. And the better it is, the more immune it will be to malicious attacks.