Have you googled your name?

This was a question posted by the guys over at RockTheJob and yes, yes I have googled my name. The results:

0 hits out of 100 on google.com when searching for Jason Van Dyk.
1 hit out of 100 on google.com when searching for “Jason Van Dyk”.
0 hits out of 100 on google.com when searching for www.jason-v.com.

Now I’m not too concerned about this at the moment. For a website that was born out into the cyber world only a few days ago it is expected. So how will I appear on the web?

RockTheJob.com suggests that signing up to social media networks, and gives you a list of 50 or so sites. A concept which I like to think of as “Why should google trust you, if no-one else does?”. Very similar to a our naturally thinking back in the real world. Would you buy product A, if you have never heard of it before? Never seen it before?

Social Networking sites (Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, MySpace, etc), that are well established are sites that google trusts,  so joining up to them is a way of fast tracking your name on the web. Personally though, I’m against that. I’m not going to join up to a service that I wont ever use again, as it goes against the concept of keeping the data fresh, keeping people interested. So I believe joining up to a few and staying active is the way to go. Not to mention the hassle of joining a million services but if you do decide to go down that track there is a useful spread sheet they have made available to download in their post i mentioned earlier.

If you have a website, your wont be just focusing on your name, you will want to get your website on the search engine results. There are a few ways to help in getting this done.

Have another site, link to you (think of word of mouth for the digital world) in the form on trackbacks, links, etc. This touches on the concept of reciprocal links. If your not familiar it a link exchange between two sites. you post their link, they post yours. This is another way to fast track yourself on to google but it shouldn’t be thought of something that “You Must Have”. If it doesn’t suit your site, by all means don’t use it.

So if your not using a form of link exchange you still need sites to link to you. This touches on the purpose of your website. If you can provide useful information or something that isn’t elsewhere on the net. People will want to link to you. People will want to point to blog post. This is something which all sites should be looking to gain.

In the up coming weeks I plan to monitor the progress of my name and site on google.com and talk about some of the steps I’ve taken to increase my web presences on the net, in this real world example.