I know, I am using Spring as an excuse to write to you about all the things you should be doing online. Some of you may be saying, “Oh, gosh, I haven’t even finished getting online right, how can I spring clean it already?!”

Well, this is the perfect opportunity for you, then! Here are some EASY and SIMPLE steps anyone can take to boost their appearance on the web. And trust me, people DO look.

1. Evaluate.

Do you remember all of the places you are listed online? Heck, I don’t! When social media just came out, people signed up for everything. But obviously, we only use just a few online tools like Facebook and Twitter.

So first, start writing down all of the places that you KNOW you are listed in. Then, start searching for those you forgot. Look in your email box for welcome messages from accounts you may have opened. Do a search in Google for your own name, your “handle” (or whatever you may have used to identify yourself) and of course, your business name.

Look for a Google listing, yellowpages and other online phone books. Make sure you write down your website, blog and any other mini-website you may have had at one point, including Yahoo, Godaddy, or (God forbid) Microsoft.

Once you have a complete list:

2. Decide what you want to keep, and throw away what you don’t.

Since our bodies themselves cannot live online, the only thing people are going to know about us in the world wide web is what they see online. So, we want to try and do a good job at representing!

There are some things you may want to throw out… like an old Godaddy website that you don’t use anymore. Please, please throw it out.

But there are other things you may want to hang onto, even if you don’t actively use it. For example, I signed up for a Foursquare account some months ago, but since then decided it was too dangerous to use. So, I have this old Foursquare account hanging out there in cyberspace that I don’t ever use. So what should I do? I am going to hang on to it… I will explain what to do with it in Step 3.

So how do you decide what to keep and what to get rid of?

Use these simple rules. If ALL of them apply, keep the account:

• The account helps you get found on Google
• The account is up to date OR can be updated
• If you don’t plan to be active on the account, it will sustain itself
• It does not conflict with your current brand
• It makes you look good

How do you shut your accounts down? Well, that is the tricky part. A lot of services make it kind of difficult to shut down. Myspace, for example, used to be almost nearly impossible. In fact, for my Spring cleaning I have promised myself that I will find a way to take my old, decrepit, almost non-existent 10 year old Myspace account down.

Once you have a complete list of all the accounts you are keeping:

3. Write a standard bio for you and your company.

Gather the basic information about yourself. You want your accounts to be consistent and correctly branded across the board. What will you need for your standard bio?

• A professional picture (maybe a few versions and one with your family)
• A thumbnail version of your picture (very small copy for microblogging, etc)
• Your bio (who are you, what do you do, why do you do it)
• Your “tagline” (a sentence about what makes you … you)
• A couple of favorite quotes

Once you have all of this information compiled you can go to step 4:

Step 4: Update all of your accounts

Using the information you gathered, you can mix and match it to all of your accounts online. Easy, consistent, clean.

Consider yourself Spring Cleaned! Now… there is just one more thing you need to do:

Step 5: Keep track of all of your accounts.

Write them down with their user names and passwords, and the email address that is assigned to them. Trust me, this will save you a ton of headache in the future.

Check out these other articles on Spring Cleaning:

How to Clean Up Your Facebook >

Twitter Spring Clean Up >

An 8-Step Plan for Social Media Spring Cleaning >