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They offer two types of accounts: one requiring a monthly subscription fee of $9.99 and another which is free.
This article will talk about the free account because I am a Youtube Marketing loser and I have no money to splurge on services like this.
Anyway, you can synchronize your account with the Brandyourself.com service and it will give you advice on how to improve your personal pages in search results for your name. It will also tell you how effective your SEOing has been; for example, I have a very good rating. Pretty much every top Google Search result for my name, 'Carey Martell', is not just about me; the majority are also pages I actually control,
This is partly because my parents did at least one thing right when I was born; they gave me a highly unusual name.
The other reason is because I've actually been quite busy making lots and lots of pages with my name all over them.
Anyway, the main use people will have for this website is getting pages they own to show up on the front page of Google search results for their own names. This requires you to properly SEO your many personal accounts and this is one thing I haven't been doing as well as I could have.
As an example, my Twitter account's public name was originally set as 'Carey M.' when I made my account. However, the website tools recommended I change it to 'Carey Martell'. This now seems very obvious, but for all the years I've had Twitter it never occurred to me that I should do this.
It also encouraged me to put the name 'Carey Martell' in my bio section. Again this should be obvious but it is something that completely slipped my mind until it was pointed out.
Now although this service is meant for your personal brand (i.e. Your real name) you can use the same techniques it suggests for your brand. For example, when I added 'Carey Martell' to my Twitter I also added 'The RPG Fanatic Show', 'Youtube' and 'roleplaying games' to my bio so that when people search for those keywords my Twitter account will appear more often in the search results.
All that said, there does seem to be some dubious suggestions. For example, the site recommends I make my Twitter website my brandyourself.com profile instead of my personal website.
This recommendation is seems designed to help improve the search rankings of the brandyourself.com website instead of my own content I want to drive people to, so I'm going to ignore this piece of "advice" and suggest others do the same.
Anyway the service also allows you to link to your Youtube channel and perform the same kind of SEOing upgrading to your account.
One of the steps it recommends is having a Youtube channel whose username is identical to your personal brand; in this case it suggests I make a channel named 'Youtube.com/Careymartell' . In this case I'm not going to do so because I already created a channel like that and because the Youtube channel I actually want to promote is http://www.youtube.com/therpgfanatic
There are other tips which are useful for me; I can update my bio page to include 'Carey Martell' in it....
....and as I do so I can also add keywords to my title section like 'RPG Fanatic Show' and 'Video Game Reviews'.
The free service offers optimization tips for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, BigSight, Quora, Flickr, Tumblr, Google+, and Youtube....so there is quite a few social networks supported by the free account.
If you get a paid account you can also monitor your Delicious, Foursquare, Diigo, Webshots, Stumbleupon, Hunch, Daily Motion, Daily Booth, Digg, Squidoo, Fotolog, Slideshare and Lookup Page, Blogger, Wordpress, Weebly, Flavors.me, Posterous, Pen.io, About.me, Zerply, and Formspring accounts and their rankings in search engine results.
However, a lot of the SEOing suggestions can be summarized as,
"Just stick your brand name in the bio, username and title of your pages!"
Every service allows you to do this, although it may call it something a little different; for example, Twitter calls it your bio while Google+ calls it a a tagline. But it's all the same to the search engines.
I can't see what advice it gives for platforms like Blogger and Wordpress but I assume sticking 'Carey Martell' in every page on Wordpress and every blog article I write would improve the search engine results of those pages.
One of the biggest benefits is that your profile page on brandyourself.com is optimized to help boost traffic to your various websites. For example, here is mine, http://careymartell.brandyourself.com/
Brandyourself.com has a pretty decent Alexa ranking and PageRank rating, so by having links like this on your page it does help improve the Google search results of your many profiles.
In closing there is one last thing I should remind people about Search Engine Optimization that many places don't tell you and that Brandyourself.com does make effort to remind users of,
Google Search results are largely based on geographical locations, and that makes it very difficult to dominate the front page of Google.
I've told this to friends before and they've accused me of being full of crap, but it's the honest truth.
Google Search results are determined by very complicated algorithms and some of these algorithms display your results based on what other Google Search users in your geographical location have selected in searches for those terms.
For example, let's say I'm a plumber in Austin, TX. In order for my business to succeed I need my website to appear in the top Google results for "plumber" when anyone in the Austin, TX area searches for "plumber".
The way I achieve that is by...
...including a Google maps plugin to my website that says my business is located in Austin, TX...
....splashing plumbing related keywords all over my page....
...and then I need local business websites in the Austin area to link to my website using a keyword like "plumbing"...
...and I also need people who perform Google searches for "plumbing" to find my listing on Google and click on it, because that determines the "local user activity" rating of my page.
You'll see that national chains like Roto-rooter will appear at the top of Google results for plumbing in most major areas where Roto-rooter operations, because Roto-rooter is one of the largest plumbing franchises and it is national. Every other result after Roto-rooter is likely to be a local small business in your area.
The only exception is if you do something like "plumbing San Marcos, CA"; it will then display results for the region you used as keywords.
I'm pointing this out because chances are you don't have an unusual name like 'Carey Martell' to help you. You probably share a name with other individuals who work in the same exact industry you do. The way you differentiate yourself is by focusing on boosting your geographical results.
For example, if my name was 'John Smith' and I was a birthday clown in San Antonio, TX then I would focus on networking with other business in the San Antonio, TX area to get them to link back to my websites, and I would make sure my websites all have 'San Antonio, Texas' on every page that has my name, along with keywords related to birthday clowning.
Or change my name to something less common.
Anyway, I believe brandyourself.com can be very useful to those trying to improve their Google search rankings for personal brands and I recommend you check it out.
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