What happens when you search Google for [your name]? Do you like what you see?
Part of that depends on your name. If your name is common (Joe Smith) or owned by a celebrity (if your name is Michael Phelps and you’re not a swimmer, good luck) you might be in trouble. For the rest of us, there are some things you can do to help.
Ed Kohler has just written an excellent post on the best ways to control the results that come up for your name. In a nutshell, you need to create accounts using your name on popular sites, then get them to rank near the top. In Ed’s case, he owns all of the top 10 results and 89 of the first 100. I own all 10 for my name, and 49 of the first 50.
So how do you do it? Between Ed and myself, our top 10 consist of pages such as:
- Personal site/blog
- Squidoo page
- LinkedIn profile
- Staff page at work
- FriendFeed profile
- Twitter profile
- Facebook profile
- Digg profile
- Flickr pages
- Amazon profile
- Various other sites
The vast majority of those are sites that you can register for in under a minute. The more you can contribute to each site, the better. For example, if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, then you have a lot more links pointing to your profile (from your followers), thus raising your ranking for that profile.
However, even if you don’t have time to build each profile out, at least get registered, get your name reserved, and try to get back to it eventually. Building up your search results will take some time, so do it now while it’s not a big deal, and it’ll be ready for you if you ever need it (job hunt, etc).
