He’s right. As we get older, the things we used to believe change and evolve. Unfortunately, we can’t do much about the things we put on the internet 5, 10, and 15 years ago. They’re there forever—stuck. So the question is what do we do about the results surrounding our name that we’re not happy with.

That’s where reputation management comes in.

He called his college paper and asked to have his name changed on the articles he wrote. Not surprisingly, they refused to change his name. So what’s his alternative? He can use some of the same techniques that we use with searchEGO. If he wants to he can spend a lot of time using SEO tactics to crowd out the results he doesn’t want online. The more uncommon your name, the easier it is to see results.

One of the best ways to drive your name up in the search results is to build links around your name. You want to get clickable links that are pointing to your website or profiles whose text is your name. For example, to drive my Facebook Profile up in Google’s rankings I’d get an anchor text to my profile with the text Joshua Unseth (if you click on it, why don’t you invite me to be your friend). This is particularly effective when it comes to sculpting an online profile for yourself as you send out resumes—the time when people might actually Google your name.

The two biggest link brokers are Text Link Ads and LinkXL. But beware, Google frowns on link buying as a method for ranking higher. It’s not a big deal if you do just a little bit of it. But if you buy tons of links and Google notices, they’ve been known to penalize sites (sometimes even dropping them out of their results). If you want to try though, buying links is cheap enough that you can buy a junk domain and just experiment. See how well and how quickly it works. Take it from me, a little bit of link-buying alongside some organic link building (those links that just come to you over time when other people or bots discover your content) goes along way.

If you’re interested in more discussion about link buying, check out Aaron Wall’s post on how to buy links, or speak to a searchEGO representative for more information on how we can manage your reputation management campaign for you.

There once was a student in college who regularly wrote for her school’s papers (not me I swear). Outside of school she was working for Fidelity doing the job of an MBA, managing the accounts of high net-worth individuals. She was getting final round interviews at all the big banks, although she wasn’t given an offer until mid June, way after most banks had made their offers. She was hired by one of the major banks to work in England.

She moved to England at the end of the summer. But almost as soon as she had ended training, small banks began to close. Then Bear Stearns went down; Lehman followed. By the end of October her ten person team shrunk to eight, and by the end of November, their team was down to just six people. Afraid that her job was at risk, she started sending out her resume to other banks, but stopped as things appeared to stabilize.

By the end of February, banking was getting to her, and the workload of the shrunken team was more than she could handle. She began sending out resumes again. At the time, though, none of the jobs she applied for really tickled her fancy and she elected to remain in her current position.

Then, at the beginning of May, she and her project supervisor, the last two members of their team, were let go. She moved back to the US and began applying for high-level government positions working with the poor. Ultimately, her new position affords her the same amount of respect, requires the same set of skills, and makes her much happier to boot (although there was a bit of a paycut). But I digress.

Tying it all together on Google

So what sort of search activity occurred around her name whenever she sent resumes out. Well, I don’t know what happened on the internet as a whole, but I can tell you the amount of traffic that was directed to the school paper’s website from people Googling her name.

A. Corresponds to the time she was applying for jobs before graduation
B. Corresponds to her sending out resumes when the banks started to collapse
C. Corresponds to the time she sent out resumes after the stress of banking
D. Corresponds to the month that she was fired.

She had sent out resumes during four distinct periods, during which time, the search around her name increased greatly. And if you’ll notice, the Bounce Rate is 40% (this on a website whose bounce rate is up near 75% sitewide). What this tells me is that the traffic is targeted further evidenced by the fact that each visitor is visiting over 4 pages per session. The readers ARE perusing her writing. What’s more, despite the low bounce rate and the number of visited by each visitor, the average time on the site is less than 2 minutes.

Using these simple numbers we can determine a few really important things (although this is just a small snippet of one person’s search data). 1) Employers DO search your name when you apply for jobs. 2) They seem to look at a breadth of your material. And 3) they don’t spend a lot of time looking at it.

In a sense, the days of first impressions are over. Your first impression is your Google Impression. And your Google Impression may prevent you from ever getting to show off who you are in person.

While it’s not really new news (since reputation management is basically just search engine optimization for individuals), the okay is nice to see for those who are nervous about Google in light of what what Google has done to sites that engage in activities Google isn’t comfortable with.

I suppose you could read this in two ways. You could conclude that because the top 100 CEOs don’t see the importance in social media, then it’s obviously of no use. Or, you could read it and conclude (correctly) that these CEOs just don’t see the possibilities of social media. UberCEO is a bit more cynical. They indict the CEOs for being out of touch with the “way their own customers are communicating” for reasons of fear, lack of knowledge, and time constraints.

A lot of people are afraid to get on the social media thoroughfare. You want to connect with clients. Do you want them to understand who you are or what you do? You can’t just run a commercial on television anymore.

You need to engage your users. If you want evidence take a look at companies like Woot…or just look at the Barack Obama campaign. Woot and the Obama campaign built their success on the back of social media. Even some grocery stores are jumping on the social media bandwagon with a fare amount of success; Whole Foods, for example, has nearly 1 million followers on Twitter. There are only 35 accounts with more followers. Needless to say, Social Media is powerful. Whether it’s making friends on facebook or using Twitter to convert sales, having a strong social media presence is more important than you can even know. Think about what you could do with 1 million users at your fingertips.

The reality is, if, as a CEO you don’t know how your brand’s new and future users are connecting to each other and, indeed, the brands themselves, you’re going to become irrelevant, and no one wants to be irrelevant. So get with the times! In the words of the famed General Eric Shinseki, “if you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

What he describes is a time-consuming process, but well-worth the headache for those that need a little bit of online reputation cleanup.

I suppose you could read this in two ways. You could conclude that because the top 100 CEOs don’t see the importance in social media, then it’s obviously of no use. Or you could read it and conclude (correctly) that these CEOs just don’t see the possibilities of social media. UberCEO is a bit more cynical. They indict the CEOs for being out of touch with the “way their own customers are communicating” for reasons of fear, lack of knowledge, and time constraints.

A lot of people are afraid to get on the social media thoroughfare. If you want to connect with clients, if you want them to understand who you are or what you do, then you can’t just run a commercial on television anymore.

You need to engage your users. If you want evidence just take a look at companies like Woot…or just look at the Barack Obama campaign. Woot and the Obama campaign built their success on the back of social media. Even some grocery stores are jumping on the social media bandwagon with a fare amount of success; Whole Foods, for example, has nearly 1 million followers on Twitter. There are only 35 accounts with more followers. Needless to say, Social Media is powerful. Whether it’s making friends on facebook or using Twitter to convert sales, having a strong social media presence is more important than you can even know. Think about what you could do with 1 million users at your fingertips.

The reality is, if, as a CEO you don’t know how your brand’s new and future users are connecting to each other and, indeed, the brands themselves, you’re going to become irrelevant, and no one wants to be irrelevant. So get with the times! In the words of the famed General Eric Shinseki, “if you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

Being that this was in the early days of Google’s super-popularity, I remember how shocked he was when I mentioned that I had looked him up online. But since then, the practice of searching people’s names online (a practice that is now called Googling) before you become their college roommate, go on a date with them, hire them, or make a business deal with them has become standard fair.

Working to make your online self appear high in the search results with positive articles about you being at the top of Google, Yahoo, and the other search engine pages has come to be known as Reputation Management. And while there are a lot of things you can do to manage your online presence, it can be extremely time-consuming (which is why we’ve created searchEGO™).

I ran into an article the other day that discussed whether reputation management even works, which is a really good question. The truth is, while you can’t usually wipe away online information that you don’t want, you can oftentimes push results down to where no one will really go to see them. Take, for example, a doctor in New York City with a reputable practice, but one of his patients decides to sue him for whatever reason. If he doesn’t have an online presence, there is the chance that the only thing that will show when people run his name through the search engines is the lawsuit. Whether he won it or not, it doesn’t really matter. If people see that he was sued, the lingering question in their minds is going to be whether they can trust him or not. In that situation that the doctor should aim to get that lawsuit dropped off the first page or two of search engine results. And, for the most part, that’s entirely possible by replacing those negative results with positive results that are in your control. It is to say, reputation management does work.

But it’s important to remember that while reputation management can work to drive down negative results, it isn’t only for those people with a negative online presence. For years, companies have been understanding the benefits of ranking in the top of the search results for the right keywords. That brand-focused SEO (search engine optimization) marketing has begun a new movement of treating your name as your brand. Marketing this brand the right way could open up a lot of opportunities. Take that same doctor we mentioned earlier. Let’s say he was never sued, but at the same time he has no solid foundation or presence online. His lack of an online presence means that he could be losing a lot of business. If someone moves into his area and searches “doctors east village nyc” it would be extremely valuable if he showed up on the front page in the top few results. With the right tactics these kinds of benefits are very attainable.

The people behind the searchEGO service, The JAR Group, are well aware of the benefits of using search engine optimization to generate profits for corporate clients. They have transitioned this knowledge into the realm of the “personal brand”, so that individuals can take advantage of everything the internet has to offer.

The problem is that when our name is searched, most of what people will find is irrelevant, about someone else, or isn’t indicative of the image we’d like to present to the world (if you don’t believe me, do it now:

).

In the age of Facebook and MySpace, employers and clients alike are using social media to hire and fire.

Your online presence is important. In this day and age, first impressions are a thing of the past. When people meet you for the first time, there’s a chance that they’ve spent some time surfing around the internet to find a picture of you or a little bit of information about who you are. Wouldn’t it be nice if you decided what others saw when they looked you up? Wouldn’t it be nice to carefully craft that first impression?

That is the thinking behind searchEGO™. We at The JAR Group want to help you control your personal brand (because, let’s be honest, nowadays, that’s what a name is—a brand). What we do is we manage your online presence. We want to help you own all the important search results for your name by using proven internet marketting techniques at a fraction of what you’d expect to pay.

Who would benefit from using searchEGO?

While we think that everyone could benefit from this service, we have selected a few industries where people have seen results from owning their name.

We think that searchEGO is especially important for:

• Doctors
• Lawyers
• Anyone named Ron Jeremy

Don’t just read about the people who are benefiting from their online presence, be one of them and harness your searchEGO today!