If you google your name what do you find? If a potential employer googles your name what do they find? Below I will outline a number of ideas on how to increase your page rank in the Google search results. Before we delve into that topic I think it is important to get a refresher on how important search engines are to internet users.
1. Search Engines are the primary tool used to find links to information on the internet. In a recent survey 40% of all internet traffic goes to Google.
2. In order to get a high placement on Google's search engine you must understand how the Google search algorithm works.
3. Specific and strategic techniques can be used to elevate content to the first page of the search results.
All search engines work in a similar way, so we will just focus on the Google search engine. Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com are a few of the main competitors to Google for English speaking internet users.
How does Google work? Google crawls every available web page and index's everything into a giant relational database. Then it ranks pages based on a number of factors...
Details from http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Top 5 Ranking Factors
Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
73% very high importanceExternal Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)
71% very high importanceDiversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)
67% very high importanceKeyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importanceTrustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)
66% very high importance
Overall Ranking Algorithm
- 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
- 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
- 20% Anchor Text of External Links
- 15% On-Page Keyword Usage
- 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data
- 6% Social Graph Metrics
- 5% Registration and Hosting Data
So, we need to focus on keywords (your name) written multiple times in the title and body. This is common as the author of the posting or article is usually given credit a couple of times.
Here are 3 strategies that you can use to elevate the content that you desire people to find when they use google.
1. Use Linkedin (professional contacts) and Facebook (personal contacts) to connect with everyone you know and all your colleagues through out the world. The goal is to have lots of people link to you. (see ranking factor #1 and #2). Sign up for these free services, get out every address book you have and send everyone an invite.
2. Start a blog. One idea would be to publish tidbits that you find during your weekly reading or interesting ideas. People love to read and comment on these things. You only need to publish one 250 word posts per week, to make a huge difference.
3. Encourage your friends and co-workers to utilize these free tools (facebook and linkedin). Every link back to the your name or website will strengthen the hold on managing the on-line presence. Encourage your friends to write their own blogs and link to each other and you.
Consistency is more important than anything else. Follow these strategies each and every week and the search engines will display changes immediately and any noise content will be relegated to the back pages in 30-60 days.
