Instead, they’re aiming at the sweet spot of convenience and price for search engine optimization. On one extreme, if my Google results are buried, I could hire a reputation company to work their magic for thousands of dollars. Or, I could read SEOmoz’s free, 10-chapter Beginners Guide to SEO. Neither is very appealing, so most people opt for none of the above. But that’s where the cases of mistaken identity creep in. “Pete [Kistler, BrandYourself founder] was being mistaken for a drug-dealer in Google and couldn’t get an internship in college,” explains cofounder Patrick Ambron. (I sympathize; my name-twin is a ridiculously ripped body builder, whom I have thankfully outstripped in SEO glory.) Based in Syracuse, New York, the venture-funded startup guides you through the SEO process for free, with premium features like monitoring who visits your sites. Their strength is UI: they hold your hand through the process of analyzing your current Google results, creating a pre-SEO-optimized BrandYourself profile (according to Ambron, 80% of profiles show up on the first page of Google results in 2 weeks), submitting links to your content, and boosting those links. In case you get lost, there’s always a “What’s next?” button that will suggest an action to take. None of this is rocket science: to boost links, you are advised to update their content, mention your name a lot, and share on social networks. But I would never do these things without BrandYourself. Could Google see all this as gaming the system, and downgrade BrandYourself results? Not at all, says Ambron: BrandYourself is a finalist at the 2012 SXSW Accelerator in the innovative web technologies category.
