Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

In collaboration with Robert David Hunter, one of Personal Branding Blog’s best commenter’s.  Robert currently works for International Quality and Productivity Center in New York. London based IQPC produces conferences and seminars for business leaders across 30 different industries. In his role as a Finance Division Sales Executive, Robert leverages his banking industry expertise in bring the top people and companies in Finance to these events. He is also on site at these conferences to represent the interests of his clients.
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We work to develop personal brands to let people know who we are and what value we bring to professional relationships, be they people or companies. It’s important to remember, though, that a well articulated brand is only as effective as how many people are actually seeing it. More viewers, more potential relationships. Of course, this leads into a general marketing discussion but we wanted to focus specifically on Google visibility.

Your visibility on Google is the gateway to your Web presence. People looking for you go to Google. It is the search engine of record. If Google says you don’t exist then in a very real sense you don’t. Your searchability is a critical measure of your brand.

Google ranks relevance to a query, such as a person’s name, through it’s PageRank™ algorithm. Needless to say, it’s highly complex. There are scores of ways to make your webpage more friendly to this system. However, let’s be practical and keep it to the bare minimums that everyone should be doing.

• Establish a profile on LinkedIn - PageRank™ regards LinkedIn more highly than other social networking sites. It can make it easier for people to find you and you can put links to your other web activities on your profile.
• Reciprocate site links – PageRank™ counts the links to your site from other sites in determining where it ranks you. Consider reciprocating site links with other people in your network. Bear in my mind that putting a link on your site says that you are recommending it. Be sure it’s a quality site that has relevance to your brand.
• Make your title tag site relevant – PageRank™ gives added weight to a site’s title in searches. This should seem obvious. Consider having your name and the general theme of your site in title.

You will notice that some popular social networks carry a lot of weight (see picture above) in Google. From what I’ve noticed, Facebook, LinkedIn, Lyro, Technorati, YouTube, Twitter and Blog Catalog are favorable. You should join these popular services, so that you can “own your brand” on Google. If you have negative publicity associated with your brand, by joining these networks, you can push those results down, so that if someone Google’s you, your personal brand will be secure. Also, purchase your domain name immediately (yourname.com).

If your name is Britney Spears, Oprah or someone else that is famous, you need to focus on differentiating yourself by middle name or a quick catch phrase. This can be somewhat challenging and may require some tuning and SEO/M expert craftsmanship. When you have a unique name, it’s far easier to stand out, shine and control your rankings. Blogging is the easiest way to climb to the top, as blogs are updated more frequently and there are more link-backs within blogs that catapult your rank.