Purple [born in or to the purple, of royal or exalted birth: Those born to the purple are destined to live in the public eye.]
If you want to enhance your presence and carve out your own royal estate on the web you need to show up as a noble in the Google Index. In order for that to happen there are a few basic fundamentals that must take place.
Your profile is your most important foundational building block. Make sure that everywhere you are on the web that uses a profile is detailed, well written, and complete. You need to walk right up to the Google Index, knock on that door and tell them in a clear loud voice with authority three things...
- Who you are.
- Where you are.
- What you do.
Do you have a Google Profile? This is in all likelihood the most important profile you can have online. Why, because it sits right smack on the Google servers and it’s hardwired directly to their index. Your profile here isn’t your resume; it’s your main connection point identifier as to everything you are on the web.
Fill out the Google Profile as completely as you can and anytime you join or get involved with a new social media site, blog, or join a community, be sure to comeback and include the URLs.
Tell it where you’ve lived, where you grew up, and where you live now. Why? Think about our training, we’re a society of online searchers... When we Google anything, how do we do it? Most often it’s where and what, or what and where.
Some of the profile info is not visible to the public, so let it know all the email addresses you use. They act as unique identifiers to claim your content.
This is really important because you are helping Google index everything that is you on the web. Your goal after all is to populate the index with as many references to you as possible with a clear path back to you (inbound links). It sounds techie, but it’s not. In fact when you consider the time you spend online and wonder if its quality time or not, ask yourself this question; “Is what I’m doing online right now making a contribution to my index entries with links back to me?” If not, you’re time there might be best spent differently or elsewhere.
Think of it like this; “Hey Google, it’s me, ‘THE’ Rene’ Fabre.” (Knock, Knock) I’m the Rene’ Fabre you want to pay attention to. (Not those other French dudes in France I compete with on occasion for web attention and there's that other one roaming around China right now taking and uploading pictures to the web.)
Google’s response: “Prove it.” OK, I will...
I’m the Rene’ Fabre at Ticor Title Company and I live in Renton. I’m the IT Marketing Director and my region is Washington and Oregon. My specialty is internet marketing, social media, and technology development and solutions. I’m the Rene’ Fabre on Activerain, Linkedin, Biznik, renefabre.net, Facebook, Ticorweb.com, Yelp, and Twitter etc. I frequently give talks, roundtables, workshops and classes on internet marketing, contemporary prospecting, and lead generation. I have taken my conversation online and I participate in numerous communities.
So (and therefore) any conversation you find via these and other sites with my name are from the one and only me. Please Google, tie all these activities neatly together and associate them with me and put it in my very own special [Fabre_René] folder (that you have reserved for me) in your index.
Thank you...
Sincerely and best regards,
me.
Everywhere that you are online that includes a profile, complete it. If you don’t you’re missing out. Google wants to deliver up the most relevant and best search results it can. (And it does a pretty darn good job at it.) To be included in those results Google needs to be clear that you are a professional (with authority) and you know what you’re talking about.
How do I gain authority? I participate by delivering up meaningful conversation (content) on the subjects I claim to be an expert. The content of my conversation online gets reinforced by who I say I am in my profile(s). I need to be talking to people online and have them talking back to me. After all, that’s what networks do, right? And that in itself is the golden rule of the net. What drives the internet? Simply put, content, new content, and changing content.
For example: you have a Linkedin.com profile...
What do you do? How long have you done it? Where do you do it? You want the description of you and your work to use words that tie you to your geography (state, county, city, neighborhood) and your experience, your participation, and the expertise you have in your area of business. Unlike the Google Profile this one is definitely a resume online. You want history. It’s hard to be recognized as an authority if you don’t have any. 
Associate with others (friend up!), it’s a network. Remember, if you belong to a community, it’s made up of people conversing. Communities are conversations and conversations are markets. If the profile includes an area for testimonials (this is important), by all means do so and include at least three. If you have someone, not you, stating you did a great job, that’s a great big vote for you being an authority.
Do not use exactly the same language in all of your online profiles. No shortcuts, don’t just copy and paste the same thing in all your profiles. Change up your language a little from place to place. Why, because each of these cyberspaces is a different community and has a different context for conversation. As human beings, we’re not exactly the same person in everyone’s eye. We’re a little bit different in each community because the conversation is different. Tweak your profile to maximize your presence in that community.
Google’s spiders crawl all public content on the web (as do the other search engines). Widgets and Gadgets are cool, but good old fashioned text with well crafted descriptive words and good grammar will take you far up the index when it comes to search engine visibility.
Google, on its 10th birthday last September had well over a trillion unique pages in its index and it’s growing exponentially every month. Make it easy for Google to index you. If Google has your profile as a guide, knows your listings, your blog, your conversations, your comments, and all the sites where you hangout, it will be able to pull ‘all that is you’ together much faster and efficiently. Like a planet, you’ll have gravity and the laws of attraction will be in place.
Photo credits:
Gary Larson, The Farside
Amnesia, I’m not bored...
OK, sounds great... so how do we manage all this again?
Stay tuned...
