The thoughts, projects, and life of Paul Kwiatkowski

There are endless articles on SEO, and how to improve your businesses search results, but that isn’t the purpose of this article. Rather, this article is intended to help individual people change how they appear in search engines. Also, this article doesn’t focus on drastic result changing; it will not teach you how to move your new blog from the 30th page of Google to the top of page 1. If you aren’t expecting miracles, but do want to be more involved in your personal search results, read on!

The other day I overheard a conversation in which a businessman was shocked to find out that a customer had found him via Google, responding “I didn’t even know I was on Google”. If you are in business, have a reputation to uphold, or just want to know what friends will see if they search for you, it really is important that you search for yourself often. Google is the most common search engine, but remember to check Bing as well, as the results can be different. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t associate your real name to much, and turns the privacy settings all the way up on whatever you do, you’ll likely find that you are absent from the results, even when narrowed down. If you’re like me, and choose to put your name out on the web, you’re likely to find at least something you’ve done. Here’s a few steps to improving how you appear in search engines.

1. Find Yourself

Searching for your name is an obvious first step, but what happens if you have a fairly common name, or share a name with a celebrity? You need to narrow down the search to locations, businesses, websites. Searching for “Your Name Your City” is more likely to pull up you, and you might be able to substitute your state as well. If you can be associated with a company, look for that as well, and also “Your Name + Website (you’ve created account on). Keep track of what searches find you, and what sites the searches found. Don’t go overboard on searching though, remember that you’re only trying to find results that contacts, friends, or employers would find, not ultra-specific completely buried info.

2. Clean Up Appearances

Now that you have an idea of how you look and what sites are easily pulled up, you should do what you can to clean up the results. Maybe you commented on a blog post a long time ago, and that post ranks high. You could delete the comment, if you don’t want your name to show up on the site, or perhaps edit the comment. Keep in mind you might not want or need to do anything. If you run into lots of old accounts popping up, for various websites and forums, you can use these results to your advantage by updating your outdated profile details.

3. Direct Traffic

While updating old accounts, include new and relevant information you can use to direct traffic to where you want it to go. If a profile on a particular forum ranks very high, you can add links, better contact info, and identifying information, such that its position in your search isn’t totally wasted. By adding links to these old accounts, you’re not only directing traffic, but boosting your site’s rank. The links you create directing to your site just may help push your preferred results above some less desirable (or relevant) hits.

4. Set Up Accounts

When searching you may discover sites that rank very high for your name, but you don’t have an account on. For me the biggest example of this was LinkedIn, ranking first for my name. The solution is extremely simple in this case, just create an account for yourself. Like re-purposing old accounts, you can use any new account you create to push visitors to where you want them to go.

5. Monitor Your Name

Set up Google alerts to track your name, and perhaps your unique username. You can do a search for yourself whenever you remember, but you can set up Google to alert you at set intervals when your name is mentioned online. This can be as simple as telling you when you have commented somewhere, but can also point you to mentions you might have missed.

There is no perfect solution for controlling what people see when they search for you, and you can’t simply pay Google to set up results how you want them. However, if you spend just a little time curating the results you do get, you might find you are much happier with how you look to Google or Bing.

(Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert on SEO. The steps provided here have been taken by me personally, and the results have been positive.)