Have you ever searched your own name on Google? I do it all the time, and the results have become very familiar to me. When you search for “Ramon Thomas” on Google.com, this is what you will see:
- 1st position is this blog www.ramonthomas.com
- 3rd position is my company website www.netucation.co.za
- 4th position is my Amazon.com Profile
- 6th position is my MySpace Profile
- 7th position is my LinkedIn profile
- 8th position is my Flickr Profile
- 9th position is my profile on Computer Society’s Web Forum (which I happen to moderate)
- 10th position is a comment on the TED blog
My own blog and my Amazon.com profile show up twice, making the 10 results displayed at a time on the search engine results page (SERP). Why is this important? It wasn’t always like this. Up until about a year ago, there were a few other “Ramon Thomas” characters who shared the first page of results with me.
The first thing I do these days when I engage with a new person is Google them. I want to see how much they have taken control of their online profile. In most cases, it’s none at all or maybe one page. Now, what is the value of controlling your online profile? I will be exploring this in a series of articles on this blog where I delve deeper into each of the above-mentioned services.
What I want to stress at this point it that you must remember that the Internet is a one-to-one communication medium. Yes, thousands or even millions of people can be reading your blog or your website but they are doing it one at a time. In this sense, you have to cater for that individual when you are writing. And each time someone is searching for your name, that is one person at a time