Vanity Search or Brand Protection?
Let's see how I look on Yahoo!
Many people Google their names or the names of their businesses occasionally to see what they find. While some people call that a vanity search, I call that brand protection. Some of you might protest that you don’t need to search for yourself because you’re not selling anything, but in reality, we’re all selling something. Anytime we’re in public in anyway, we’re selling ourselves. Everytime we meet someone, talk on the phone, write an email or send a Twitter message, we’re selling ourselves to the people we’re interacting with. If we come across well, then good things might happen. That could mean a job, a new friend, a date, etc.
The problem you are trying to guard against is people searching for you or your business on Google, Yahoo!, Bing or another search engine and turning up results that are either unfavorable or less favorable than what you would want for a first impression. That’s why it is important to periodically search for your name or brand to see what turns up in the search results. If any troublesome links spring up that you are able to take care of, then do so. If a site that you don’t want to be your primary site comes up first in the search results, such as Twitter or Facebook, then you want to try to change that. While there are many SEO sites out there that can tell you how to get your site to #1 in the results, here are two simple ways to improve the ranking of your site. (This is for a site whose name is unique to you, like your actual name. If you’re trying to rank for a term like “cars,” you’re in for a lot more work.)
The first piece of advice come from an article from Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb. He talks about how adding a small bit of code to your site can help to combat Twitter becoming your primary identity. This is something that recently happened to me on Yahoo!, so I’m using this tip myself.
The second tip is to create a Google Profile. That will help by adding your profile to your Google search results with the information that you want people to find. Of course, it’s not guaranteed to come up high in the search results, but adding more information is supposed to help with that.
These two tips are just a start, but at least they should help somewhat. If you need more SEO to get your site ranking up to snuff, well those same search engines we just used will have more than enough information to keep you busy. Good luck!
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