When I first went to college I remember waiting my roommate assignment. It came in the mail, I tore open the envelope, skimmed the letter inside, and found the name of my new acquaintance. After finding it, I ran to the computer, went to Google and typed his name in the search bar. I found out that I was rooming with the sohigh schn of a world-famous neurologist. My roommate graduated near the top of his high school class, won a few awards, and played guitar in a band. I learned all that before I had even talked to him.

Being that this was in the early days of Google’s super-popularity, I remember how shocked he was when I mentioned that I had looked him up online. But since then, the practice of searching people’s names online (a practice that is now called Googling) before you become their college roommate, go on a date with them, hire them, or make a business deal with them has become standard fair.

Working to make your online self appear high in the search results with positive articles about you being at the top of Google, Yahoo, and the other search engine pages has come to be known as Reputation Management. And while there are a lot of things you can do to manage your online presence, it can be extremely time-consuming (which is why we’ve created searchEGO™).

I ran into an article the other day that discussed whether reputation management even works, which is a really good question. The truth is, while you can’t usually wipe away online information that you don’t want, you can oftentimes push results down to where no one will really go to see them. Take, for example, a doctor in New York City with a reputable practice, but one of his patients decides to sue him for whatever reason. If he doesn’t have an online presence, there is the chance that the only thing that will show when people run his name through the search engines is the lawsuit. Whether he won it or not, it doesn’t really matter. If people see that he was sued, the lingering question in their minds is going to be whether they can trust him or not. In that situation that the doctor should aim to get that lawsuit dropped off the first page or two of search engine results. And, for the most part, that’s entirely possible by replacing those negative results with positive results that are in your control. It is to say, reputation management does work.

But it’s important to remember that while reputation management can work to drive down negative results, it isn’t only for those people with a negative online presence. For years, companies have been understanding the benefits of ranking in the top of the search results for the right keywords. That brand-focused SEO (search engine optimization) marketing has begun a new movement of treating your name as your brand. Marketing this brand the right way could open up a lot of opportunities. Take that same doctor we mentioned earlier. Let’s say he was never sued, but at the same time he has no solid foundation or presence online. His lack of an online presence means that he could be losing a lot of business. If someone moves into his area and searches “doctors east village nyc” it would be extremely valuable if he showed up on the front page in the top few results. With the right tactics these kinds of benefits are very attainable.

The people behind the searchEGO service, The JAR Group, are well aware of the benefits of using search engine optimization to generate profits for corporate clients. They have transitioned this knowledge into the realm of the “personal brand”, so that individuals can take advantage of everything the internet has to offer.