Vanity Search: A Question of Personal Branding
Search engine algorithms are top secret. I would be willing to bet that only a very select few really understand how they work within their own companies. I have been fighting the good fight and have had incredible results with search engine optimization on Philoking.com, but only recently have I discovered a serious flaw in my personal branding, and it has brought to light some inconsistencies in the algorithms that provide results.
I could be way off base here, but at least in my opinion, Google, Yahoo and Live Search are the three most popular search engines. Recently I have began monitoring vanity searches on those services with the terms “Philoking” and “Jason Burns.”
Now this site is no gangbuster of traffic, sure I get tens of thousands of unique visitors a month and my Google Page Rank is 4 and growing, but it’s no monster site, that’s for sure. Never the less, I would hope that many cases would find it higher in relevant search results and especially in the case of Yahoo and Live, they do not.
I will disclose that I spend the majority of my time tailoring to Google, but I do submit sitemaps to the other two and would expect similar results. If you go to the top three and search “Philoking,” I am in the following places:
Yahoo Live! Rank 1 1 3
No big surprises here, on Live! I am bested by my own Flickr profile twice on Live! before my domain which matches the keyword 100% ironically, makes the cut.
My name is completely different though, look at these results.
Yahoo Live! Rank 3 12 7 Top Result bbbburns.com Myspace Hoya burns
So recently I ran a question on Linkedin.com to get some suggestions for how to raise my branding on my own name and I got some great answers. I have implemented these suggestions and will see how they work. The top suggestion email came from Scott Allen from http://entrepreneurs.about.com/
#1 - Put your name in your site title, e.g., “Jason Burns’ Philoking.com”, etc. The title tag is the single most important piece of content on your site regarding search engines.
#2 - You don’t seem to have an “About me” page on your site. Create an About page and make the URL http://philoking.com/jason-burns (or /pages/jason-burns or whatever)
#3 - Modify your template so that Jason Burns in the “Posted by…” is a hyperlink to the About page you just created.
#4 - Write some articles (at least 10) and submit them to EzineArticles.com and maybe a couple of others. In your byline, make your name a hyperlink to the About page from step 2.
Do that and I can just about guarantee you you’ll be #1 for just your name within 30 days. And then you can buy me a chai latte. :-)
Thank you very much for the tip and you can guarantee that if it works I’ll do more than buy you a tea!
I would love for this to become more of a live SEO discussion, please comment and tell me how you have helped brand your website.
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I agree that the tags are important, but I didn’t think they had a huge bearing on search engine rankings.
IMO they’re more important for the user than the actual search engine, because they are what the user will read in the list of results that the search engine provides.