Why bother to build an online presence if you can’t monitor and control it? Emphasize the positives and de-emphasize the negatives with BrandYourself, a startup that helps you control Google results for your name through good, old-fashioned SEO. SEO, or “search engine optimization” still works in this modern-day and age of social, so it is worth devoting at least a percentage of your attention to it.

BrandYourself leverages  the familiar dashboard / profile set up, easy to activate with step-by-step directions. When I say step-by-step, I mean it. They walk you through the process of setting up your profile and boosting your content, educating you on the why along the way. I even learned a few things setting my profile up.

There are free and paid options. BrandYourself users employing the free option can optimize up to three links they want to push up in search results for their names. Your profile page will assist you in linking out and into that profile, which increases  Google page ranks. From your profile on BrandYourself, you can  link out to other online profiles, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, or your own sites and blogs. And it will help you promote them, with guidance on how to improve SEO for each site. Paid options give you unlimited sites to link to and optimize.

Another interesting feature of BrandYourself is the ability to track who is looking at your profiles and links – the feature is brand new as of thisTuesday. The feature shows you where visitors to your BY profile are located and where they work, based on their IP address. This is done by matching the IP addresses from the visitors to BrandYourself’s own database of publicly available IP addresses. Is this useful? Well, it really only tracks the biggest players – the publicly available IP addresses of smaller players probably aren’t listed in the database. But it certainly will motivate you to keep your BY profile spiffy. And that isn’t a bad thing when you are trying to control your online SEO.

So, why would you go paid versus free? Here is the comparison chart from their site:

And here is their pricing:

You can find my BrandYourself profile here. Since it is free for the basic service and three links, why not give it a try?