Defeat the Doppelgangers: Important steps towards making your good name Google friendly

You may be the preeminent web consultant in Phoenix, Arizona, but with a name like Steve Stevenson or John Jackson, it’s going to be difficult to be found when employers and prospective clients go a-Googling for you.

Even with Google’s regional results helping you along, chances are that numerous similarly named individuals will show up and steal your well-deserved traffic. Not only that, there’s another important perhaps more dangerous persona lurking about using your name: your former self. You know him or her –  the angsty teenager who wrote gothic poetry on LiveJournal, the over-passionate activist in college who got arrested for streaking for animal rights and the newbie on the forums asking no-brainer questions. Using the following steps, you can be sure that the number one Google hit for your name is the professional, up-to-date, uncontroversial you.

Step 1: Kick Your Former Self to the Curb

This one’s easy and, ideally, shouldn’t be a problem at all. If you had the proper foresight, you set all of your social networking profiles to private and were diligent in removing any objectionable content, like your party pictures and drunken rants.   If not, don’t worry: you can still protect yourself from your self.

Begin by Googling yourself (and Binging and Yahoo searching, just to be safe) and see what comes up. Really dig deep, so click through to the second and third results pages. What you’re looking for is any mention of your old screen names or e-mail addresses.

Why? A diligent background checker or employment screener will find these and then plug THOSE into search engines. That opens an entire other can of worms. For instance, if you post on the Cosplay forums as DarkKnightWolf72, of course, your posts and pictures won’t show up if someone Googles your given name. But once the screener learns to associate a screen name with you, the jig is up.

Luckily, services that use screen names, like forums, Xanga, MySpace, LiveJournal, mostly allow you to delete your entire account. Do so, if necessary. Google should clean up all the cached versions and links in time. If you’re in a hurry and you own the web space, you can submit a request to remove saved versions of pages through Google Webmaster Tools or Yahoo Site Explorer. On Facebook and MySpace, you can set your pictures and profile to private without deleting your account. This easily done from your privacy settings. On Facebook especially, be sure to set your “photos of you tagged by others” to private.

Step 2: Make Yourself Findable

This is an important step towards disambiguation. You can’t totally eliminate all the other Joe Johnsons in your city, but you can make it easy for screeners and clients to tell which is you.  There are a couple surefire ways to do this.

Get a lockdown on social networking. This is more about professional social networking sites and profiles than Facebook and Twitter, though both are integral tools for building relationships with client-bases r. Take time to setup a LinkedIn account and a Google Profile. These two profiles are some of the most visible available and may even pop up higher on the results list than your actual business website. Because of this, it is imperative you make both of these clearly linked to the professional landing page you want to direct people towards. You may also want to look into other such services like Hi, I’m and Naymz.

Aside from the established professional networking sites, you’ll also want to give your professional persona a comfortable and logical home. This means buying a domain name.  This will only cost you $10 a year; less if you find a coupon online, and will do wonders for managing your web presence. Make it specific and simple. Yourname.com or Yourname.net is best. You may also want to do lastnameconsulting.com or yourbusiness-yourcity.com if your domain name is taken.  There are tons of established good domain registrars available; you may also want to look into up-and-comers Nombray.com and Domai.nr.

Once you have your domain setup, you can either purchase some web space for hosting or simply point your domain to one of the name tag pages you set up above. At the very least though, you should include your name, location and profession and contact information. At the best, you should have a portfolio of your work, links to articles by you or about you and a blog. Speaking of which…

Step 3: Blog Smart

One of the best ways to project an impression of an active, involved professional with industry connections and coveted expertise is to maintain a blog. But be careful: a blog can be a double-edged sword. A well-written, regularly updated blog says you are organized and prolific. A sloppy, rant-filled blog that hasn’t been updated since December 2007 makes people think you’ve gone out of business.

Making your blog look pretty is relatively painless. Use WordPress. There are lots of options, but by far, WordPress is the easiest and has the best community. With hundreds of themes and plugins to choose from, you won’t need to know a single line of code to setup a high tech, slick looking blog. You can actually make your entire website from a WordPress installation. Read some tutorials and fiddle around with it during your lunch break and you’ll learn everything you need to know.

Begin building some quality content but keep your posting regular. This could mean once a day or once a month, it doesn’t matter as long as the articles come at a consistent rate and are of consistent quality. Because you’ll likely be busy handling other business items, you may want to outsource your blog content. This is by no means disingenuous, especially if you are a business rather than an individual, and can usually be achieved at a surprisingly low rate.   But make sure you hire carefully to ensure excellent quality of content.  Another route is to post occasionally yourself while hiring a part-time blogger to provide filler content about industry wide movements or simply point to PR items about your company.

A blog can also be a powerful tool for boosting your website’s PageRank. Quality content leads to organic linkbacks and fresh content catches the eyes of search engine spiders. Getting linked by a prominent blog or social media network can cause huge spikes in your traffic.

Step 4: Be Proactive

Now that you have established yourself and disambiguated your name, it’s time to keep things that way. You don’t want someone to buy your name out from under you because you forgot to renew so be diligent in keeping your domain name registered and look for opportunities to expand your presence.  . This can mean buying an additional domain name, joining blogging or professional networks, commenting often on widely-read industry sites and blogs, and other measures.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the Internet is solely the domain of business. You can still use the web to discuss hobbies and interests. Just make sure you place a buffer of anonymity between you and your non-professional pursuits. Invent a new screen name for yourself and be extra careful to avoid publicly associating it with your true identity. You can let your close friends and family know where you keep your Futurama fan fiction and risqué poetry, but don’t leave any trace that it’s you. Also, use this screen name for posting on forums and commenting on non-business items. Of course, when you’re engaging in discussions on industry-relevant topics, use your professional name and provide a link to your blog or website. Be especially careful when discussing potentially controversial topics like music, politics, or religion. The sad fact of some Internet communities is that differences in opinion often devolve into personal attacks and if someone digs up something bad about you, it can be a PR mess. Even if it’s petty or unfounded, you will still have to answer for it and it still may affect a potential client’s opinion of you.

You will also want to diversify your presence as much as possible. Google groups together results that are under the same domain name or from the same site, so to fill out your results page, you’ll want to choose several different outlets to make your name stand out. Volunteer to do guest posts, join blogging communities and create spin-off or related sites.

This is a particularly prudent measure when you need to bury bad press. If you have a particularly difficult case to crack, you may want to enlist the help of a professional. Believe it or not, they exist. A good online reputation is a crucial to doing good business, which has given rise to such firms as ReputationDefender.

All in all, you should remember to always be on your best behavior while operating on the Internet: the world is watching you.