People are searching for your name online, like it or not.  Translation: If you don’t own your name when someone searches for you, you are behind the curve.The days of first impressions beginning with a handshake are over. Three quarters of companies search for job applicants online prior to meeting them in person.  How you manage your online presence is critical to your personal brand and future success, especially for job applicants.

How do you own your name online?  Below are six steps you should actively take to ensure that your name online is marketable and professional.

1) Google yourself. Do you already own your name?

If you are like most people, you do not. Nearly everyone falls into one of three categories:

1. The “undesired” category: The results are less than flattering. Social media use exploded so fast that the line between our personal lives and our professional lives began to blur before most people had a chance to pull back the reins. By the time many people realized everything online is permanent and that “private” isn’t exactly a reality online, it was too late.
2. The irrelevant category: Sure, the results are about you but do they really back up your qualification and align with your career goals? Do they make you more hirable? Unfortunately, at this point no one cares about your high school track times or the award you received in middle school.
3. The “hey, that’s not me” category: In this case, somebody else with your name shows up. They may be famous, or worse, they may be someone you’d rather not be associated with. For example, before owning his name, when you googled our CEO Pete Kistler, you were greeted by an ex-convict from writeaprisoner.com. We’ve heard plenty of horror stories along the same line, people being mistaken for having a criminal record and strip dancers showing up first when a colleague Googled them in the office. Whatever the case, you do not want to be misrepresented when you are searched.

2) Own your domain = own your name

Now that you know where you stand in Google, it’s time to take action. Owning your domain name and creating a compelling personal website there  is the quickest, most relevant way to get listed higher on Google, not to mention a great place to direct employers online. This will be the central hub where you link to all your other profiles, and it only costs about a dollar a month, well worth the investment.

3) Create a personal site around your name

The best way to really own your name is to include everything that makes you YOU.  Be articulate and precise with your language, and emphasize accomplishments you would want employers to see.  Identify what you do best, what differentiates you from your peers and know your audience when crafting your personal brand.  Write in the third person so that Google recognizes the site is about you.

4) Own your name on professional & social networks

Create profiles on high ranking networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Brazen Careerist, Flickr and Ziggs.  Joining these networks allows you to increase your presence online and protects you from others creating accounts using your name, resulting unwanted irrelevant results.

5) Create more content and links to rise to the top of searches

When it comes down to it, to own your name, your content needs to show up at the top of Google. One of the most important factors in getting to the top, besides your domain and keyword density, is inbound links. The more links you have pointing to your name, the higher you show up.  Join free directories and profiles, such as DMOZ, Yahoo, Web World Index and Zeal.  Make sure every place you exist online links to every other place you exist online.  For example, link your YouTube account to your Facebook account and your Ziggs account to your Twitter account.

6) Own your name on news-wires

A quick way to highlight your accomplishments in Google results and create powerful links for your profiles is write press releases. Write a press release detailing any of your latest accomplishments. An award you won, your graduation, launching a website, etc.  and submit it to free newswires, such as i-newswire and Article Circulation.

Like a job search, managing your personal brand is an ongoing process that evolves and grows over time.  Your personal brand is not stagnant.  You must be diligent and continue to tweak and update your online content to own your name online, especially when job searching.

Jim Armstrong is a senior advertising management major in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.  He works in the Tina Press and David Rubin Career Development Center where he reviews resumes and cover letters.

Support me by sharing this post:

I have been talking for the past few weeks about how to get your name to the top of Google and how to seo your site to help you be found.

Instead of spending this week with another week giving our readers another step by step guide I want to show you an example an SEO’d site to point out some good and not so good.

Let’s start with our friend Dan Schawbel, he runs the Personal Branding Blog. Now, if you have taken the time to look at his site you will notice that on the home page he uses the words “Personal Branding” 22 times in visible text and a total of 125 times in Reference tags.  And no, for those of you wondering I did not count, I used this really good tool to check the keyword density of the page: http://www.keyworddensity.com/

What does this mean?  It means that if you were to read his site you would see the words “Personal Branding” 22 times and that he has optimized all of his backend content for that keyword phrase as well.  This is the reason that he comes up number 1 for the phrase and that his personal site comes up number two.

So why else does he come up so highly?  There are a couple of really important factors that should be noted.  First off, according to website grader (which scores him as a 99.5) he has over 11,000 inbound links.  This means that in Google’s eyes he has 11,000 votes towards his site being credible.  Always remember that inbound links are one of the most important factors for search engines to determine how reputable a site is.

Some of the other big things that Dan has working in his favor are:

• Publishes content on a daily basis – Search engines want to see content that is fresh, that doesn’t mean rewrite your home page every day but that does mean that you should be adding pages/posts regularly.
• Dan has good content – it is not that he is publishing the same old stuff every day; he is taking the time to put together good articles that are always focused on personal branding.  Search engines want good content for their readers.

What could Dan do better?

• Extend how long he owns the domain name- Currently (according to website grader) the domain name is only registered for another year.  Search engines want to make sure that the domain name is not new so it is good that he has owned it for almost 3 years, but they also want to see that you plan to use it moving forwards
• Leverage Digg – make sure that all of his articles are automatically submitted to Digg so that users are more apt to click on them and it makes it easier for a passive user to Digg his articles.  Social networks are playing a larger part in today’s SEO world.  Dan does effectively get his content out to many of these networks, but it is important to not let any of them slide.
• I would look to see if there is a way to do a 301/302 redirect of his old blog that he used to run through wordpress- Or at least i would start going through that site and creating links on the word personal branding to his current site.  He has not been able to overcome it at the top of Google and a linking strategy could help take away some of the Page Rank from his old site.

Dan’s site is a great example of how to do site wide search engine optimization.  He has done it very well there is no doubt there.  It is a complex process that enables you to go for higher traffic words than you can sometimes achieve with only writing a series of articles about one topic.  Also keep in mind, larger sites such as CNN and the NYTimes can more easily get harder keywords due to their higher page rank.

Next week I am going to focus my efforts on giving you insight into another important case study, a look at a single page SEO strategy and pointing out the pros and cons.  Thanks and I look forward to your questions / comments!

Support me by sharing this post:

A strong personal brand online must have a home base. This is a website that at a minimum describes the unique value you provide, states your qualifications, provides your contact information, and links out to the rest of your presence on the web. If you haven’t started your own home base website, it’s easy: start now with our Site Builder.

Ideally, your home base should be at your own URL, such as www.JohnAdams.com. Get this custom URL through us for $11.99/yr and put this URL on every career touch-point: your email signature, your resume, your LinkedIn profile, your business card, etc. Before you choose the URL you want,  read How to Search Engine Optimize Your Name.  This will make your site rank higher in Google searches when people search for you.

Editing text and uploading media is simple, and you can choose from dozens of designs to tweak the appearance of your site. What are you waiting for? Get started building your home base on the web now.

Support me by sharing this post:

For the most part when you start to create your website your SEO strategy should be very straight forward.  You want to make sure you are doing basic things such as using your full name as you want people to search for it.  You should also be making sure that you are creating a strong link network between your site and everywhere else that you exist on the web.

But there are a few things that you should be weary of that could get you into some serious Google trouble.

This list contains the 5 Don’ts of building a website:

1. Key word stuffing-  When a search engine crawls your website it looks to see what words are used often because that is how it understands the page’s topic.  You can over use words on the page.  Google looks at how many words are on the page and then looks at the density of certain words.  If you put your name in a paragraph 5 times, search engines will get suspicious and not rank you as highly.
2. Another note on keyword stuffing- It used to be an SEO tactic to put keywords at the bottom of a page in the same color as the background.  This way users did not have to see the words but the content would still be there when a search engine crawled the site.  Google wised up to this years ago and specifically looks to make sure that the content is a different color than the background and that users can see it.
3. Duplicate content-  If a search engine reads the same content twice it will assume that the content is not original and that the site is not correctly managed.  You should spend some serious time when you are writing your site’s content.  You want to ensure that it conveys the correct message.
4. Too many links-  Every link that you have going from your site to another site takes away from your rank.  You have to make sure that you are liking to good websites and that you limit the number of links that you have to the minimum.  But on the same not you want to make sure that you have a good link structure between your site and the rest of your profiles.
5. All images, no content-  Images mean little to search engines.  You should aim to have 250-500 words per page so that search engines can read the content.  Make sure that when you do have image, you have content around them.

There are many black hat SEO tactics that people sometimes use on the web.  When you are just starting off I would suggest that you create your site, create some good content and then start to tweak it.  Remember that the SEO process will take a couple months before you start noticing results.

Support me by sharing this post: