We are in the information age, which is moving us toward full public disclosure of personal information. As long as this is the direction we are being forced, we should embrace it and gain control of the search results of our own names. If you are applying for a job or a candidate for a freelance job, the potential employer is certainly going to “Google You”. If you participate in the social web, much of your personal life is on display at all times for anybody who dares to look. Would you like to be able to control what they learn about you? It would also be nice to firmly command the top search result for your name so that somebody doesn’t hijack it with a website devoted to how you suck.
One large benefit that of controlling your vanity search that I have not seen mentioned so far, is the ease of updating a master profile. If I had the top search result for ‘Michael Mindes’ and could expect to keep it, then I can have one profile that my other profiles points to. With a master profile, you have the benefit of including more thorough information about your employment, business, interests, blogs, and family. Imagine updating LinkedIn for your business information, Facebook for your interests and personal life, Twitter for your updates, and any other service that you may use. It is probably not hard to imagine, because if you are anything like me, then this is what you are doing right now.
The result of your plethora of profiles is that many of them are outdated or at least slightly outdated. Once again, if you are anything like me. Additionally without control over the search results for your name, you do not know what out-of-date profiles will be visited as a result of search traffic.
Register www.yournamehere.com
A lot of credit seems to be given to search results that match domain names. The Google algorithm knows if you are searching for Michael Mindes, that you are bound to find pertinent results at http://michaelmindes.com. Google however does not know that personal information about me is best found at http://michaelmindes.com/about-michael-mindes. It is my job to tell Google, and all of the other search engines where to find information about me.
The Tools At Your Disposal For Controlling Your Vanity Search
There are existing social networking sites of various types that are capable of returning very high name search results in Google. These are the first places that you want to go to gain some control over your personal name search. At first it will be unlikely that you can get sufficient support for your target master profile page. It will be nice to at least get some control over your vanity search by starting with the websites that rank very well for vanity searches. A word of caution, remember that everything you are doing currently will be highly visible to people who perform searches for your name. Be honest, be thorough, and exclude any information that you do not want to be public. Now for the top vanity search websites in no particular order:
- YouTube
- Google Profiles
As I am typing this, the top ten results for michael mindes are:
- My LinkedIn Profile (currently I rarely update this, and it may contain errors)
- My Twitter Profile (I actively use this)
- One of my Twitter Posts
- YouTube video for Michael Mind
- Another YouTube video for Michael Mind
- michaelmindes.com
- Lance Armstrong Quotes post on michaelmindes.com
- geofollow.com info about my Twitter profile
- classmates.com info about me (surely they want you to pay them money to view it)
- A Swedish site with my name in the <title> tag
While the top ten results for Michael Mindes are:
- My LinkedIn Profile
- My Twitter Profile
- michaelmindes.com
- Wayne Gretzky Quotes post on michaelmindes.com
- YouTube video for Michael Mind
- YouTube video for Michael Mind
- A video from dailymotion.com
- The same Swedish site as #10 above
- MySpace page for Michael Mind
- An article I wrote for phplinkdirectory.com
While Facebook did not show up on any of my top ten results, I have seen it be a very high result for many people. There are a lot of options for gaining control of your vanity search, and I suggest that you use the websites and social networks that you are interested in. I suggest that you use your full and real name for all of these sites urls like www.facebook.com/michaelmindes or www.twitter.com/michaelmindes. This will give further credibility to the search results.
Google profiles are relatively new right now, but as with is typical of most Google efforts, the profiles will be adopted by a lot of people. As a result of the adoption, Google Profiles are likely to become an integral piece of the puzzle for controlling your vanity search.
Formatting The Master About Michael Mindes Page
The formatting and on-page search engine optimization for the master about Michael Mindes page is critical. As you can tell from the search results shown above, the title tag is very important, since a completely irrelevant site from around the world made it to the top ten solely by virtue of having “Michael mindes” in their title tag. Besides having an appropriate title tag, the only other on-page seo I will have is a table of contents. Since I plan on aggregating significant information about myself, I want people to be able to find want in particular they want. I will use the keyword “Michael Mindes” frequently in the table of contents while trying to not look like spam.
The Plan To Control My Vanity Search
- Provide sufficient profile information on the non-master about Michael Mindes pages. Make this sufficiently interesting to entice people to click through.
- Point all of my social website profiles to the master about Michael Mindes page. Where I can use HTML, I plan on using the rel=”me” specification. This specification allows search engines to know that the two pages are about the same person.
- Point all of my non-social network profiles to the master about Michael Mindes page. Where I have the capability to control the anchor text for the link, I will use ‘Michael Mindes’.
- Expand the information about me on the master about Michael Mindes page
- Link to the various social networking sites that I use from the master profile page. A side benefit to this is the cross-promotion of my profiles.
- Add any additional social networking sites that interest me.
After this plan is fully implemented, I expect that my master about Michael Mindes page will be the number one result for Michael Mindes. I also expect that it will be followed by the usual suspects of social networking profiles. By doing this, I intend to control the search results involving my name and hopefully dominate the top search results in Google for my name. If can do this, it will be very difficult to promote negative information about me through search engines and it will also hopefully be more difficult to find information about me and my family that I do not want to be public.
Related posts:
- Why I Do Not Specifically Target Long Tail Search Phrases
- Twitter Traffic Experiment
- The Benefit Of Building A Link Wheel Is Bogus
- The 5 Most Important Things I Learned About Google PageRank
- One Week Twitter Traffic Experiment Results
- Attracting And Developing An Audience — Part 4
- How-To Successfully Blog Without Killing Yourself
