Clean up your Google Search Results with blogging

Newsweek recently ran a piece on companies that do online reputation management.

The idea being that pretty much any employer nowadays is going to type your name into Google before making you an offer, and you want that presentation to be as pretty, white, and clean as your actual resume. When you boil it all down, what these companies are essentially trying to sell is SEO for the individual.

If you’re not careful as a company, other sites can creep above your home page as a result in a Google search for the terms that you want to own, even if they’re searching for something that matches your exact domain. I’ve seen it happen.

For example (and no, it’s not a business), if you search for Jason Preston on Google, hoping to find Jason-Preston.com, you get a bunch of profiles and posts about some other Jason Preston, who apparently needs to have his Marc Jacobs tattoo removed. It looks like this:

My point is this: simply owning a domain doesn’t mean you’re going to own the search result.

There are several factors that affect your results, some of which you have a lot of control over, and some of which you really don’t have control over.

Here are some tricks you can use on your blog to improve your showing:

1. Make sure you write descriptive post headlines that include the keywords you’d like to see rank high in Google. If I posted more about myself, or at least shoved my name into my headlines more often, I’d have a better spread of the Google results page.
2. Use the SEO Title Tag WordPress plug-in to put extra keywords into your permalink post page headers. This means that Google has an extra set of keywords, aside from your post headline itself, to associate with a page.
3. Include outbound links in your posts. It makes Google notice your site more, and it makes other people notice your site more, which can get you inbound links, which makes Google notice your site more…
4. If you have multiple blogs at multiple domains, link between them, and use the terms you want associated with your site as a link, the way I’ve used my name to link to my site in this post.