If I search for your name in Google, will the results actually be about you?
The hallmark of a strong personal brand online is the ability to be found when someone searches for you on the web.
The first step to ensure you can be found is to create profiles on major social networks and directories including services like LinkedIn and Ziggs. Besides your “home base” website if you have one, these form the foundation of your online visibility. (Look forward to an in depth review of social networks and directories you might want to join in a future post).
If you’re already on a few social networks or directories, make sure every place you exist online links to every other place you exist online.
If you have a LinkedIn, Ecademy and Ziki profile, then these profiles should all link to each other.
This is important because Google counts every link to a web page as a “vote” for that page. Google results are really one big popularity contest. The pages that come up highest in searches for your name are generally the pages that have the most sites linking to it.
Because of this, you’ll want to get as many sites linking to your profiles as possible. And that means “interlinking” all of your profiles to get more links.
An easy way to track your interlinks is to fire up an Excel spreadsheet. Along the top row, list every social network or directory you belong to. Then list them out again in the same order down the left column. You now have a grid set up to track the interlinking between all your profiles.
The items down the left column are the places on the web you exist, and the items on the top row track whether or not there is a link to that item.
As you can see above, I grayed out a diagonal stripe to show that, for example, you can’t link from your LinkedIn page to your LinkedIn page, or your Ecademy page to your Ecademy page.
Start filling in where you already have interlinks. Let’s say that on your LinkedIn page, you already do link to your Ecamdey profile, Xing profile, Ziki profile, and Facebook profile. Fill in the first row now (the LinkedIn row) to reflect that.
The LinkedIn row now shows what you link to based on the columns that are filled in green. Do the same for Ecademy, then all your web profiles. It might look something like this:
After you’ve done some interlinking, mark which places you’ll interlink the next time you open up your personal interlink tracker. A color like yellow works well. You might also want to use red to make incomplete links stand out (unless you think that looks horrendous, which I do, but it motivates me more to turn them green).
You’re now well on your way to creating a strong web of connectedness between your entire online presence. Remember, Google counts every interlink as a “vote” for that page, increasing your results when someone searches for your name. So check back often until your whole spreadsheet is complete. Then you can, in one quick look, be sure that you’re doing everything you can to improve your online visibility.
Next: 5 Tips to Rank Highly on Google and Increase Your Visibility Online >
