Feta Cheese

“Your name is your brand” – Me

I recently wrote on my search marketing blog how important it was to make sure that you paid attention to, and took the time to monitor, your standing in Google, Yahoo and MSN’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Potential employers spring to mind as the most obvious reason to wanna positively manipulate your presence in Google, but there are other advantages as well. Easily being found by old friends, people with similar interests, former business colleagues for networking purposes, etc. The practice is generally referred to as brand reputation management (BRM) or online reputation management (ORM) and it’s a big deal. So get started on a little managing of your own. Stack the odds in your favor.

Here’s a neat little Google account feature I discovered this morning – the ability to create a public profile. If you have yet to do so you should be given the option at the top of your main account page after logging in to any of Google’s services. I have just created one for myself, David Pye, in about 15 minutes and if you currently have a GMail account, use Google Reader, Google Docs, Maps, etc. – I strongly suggest you do the same. No doubt this page will quickly rank highly in Google for searches on “David Pye” (as it’s frigging Google) and I may even make it slightly less silly in the near future as a result. As much as I’m sure people want to read about how much I love feta cheese.

I’ve never had any trouble ranking well for “Dave Pye”, as I own www.davepye.com, but for the more formal iteration it’s been a challenge. There are quite a few David Pye’s of note out there – a woodworking guru, a war veteran who has transcribed his journal notes, a Nobel Prize winning scientist – and don’t get me started on the amount of searches I get to my site each month via people looking for info on the now defunct 60’s British rock label Pye Records. They must owe royalties to a lot of people or something – folks, I swear neither I nor any of my direct relatives have anything to do with Bowie’s back catalog.

My point is, the Google Account’s newish profile page creation option is likely going to be an easy way to get myself into the top 5 or so for people searching on “David Pye”. Do yourself a favor and create one for yourself, then read an article I wrote last year about 11 other free ways to manipulate your online brand/name reputation. This may be the most important thing you read all week. That probably should have been the first sentence of this post, but well done to you if you got this far. Now get to work!