personal branding, ranking for your nameNow, more than ever, it is important to build your own personal brand. One of the best ways to do this is to make sure that your name comes up in Google when people search for you. If you do a search for “Jacob Morgan” in Google, my name comes up first out of around 650,000 results. It took me just under 2 months to rank #1 for my name (is much easier when your name isn’t very common). There is a lot more at work here than just SEO, there are a few things you have to do in order to make sure that your name comes up #1 in search engines.

You do not need to bother worrying about all the different SEO techniques out there to rank #1 for your name. Just a few basic SEO tips are all you need:

  • Put your name in the title tag
  • Put your name on the page of the site
  • Include your name (or portion of it) in the URL, aka www.johnsmith.com

The main thing you should focus on is the content that you write. When I created my blog I did not spend much time on SEO at all, most of the time was spent on writing and promoting my content through social media platforms. If you write content that people are interested in then eventually they will begin linking to you, and believe me, there usually is someone out there that is interested in what you are writing about. The more times you can get someone to link to your blog with your name in the better (but a link with your name is not necessary).

So before you go crazy trying to figure out what your site architecture needs to look like, what links you need to nofollow, what co-occurrence terms you should be looking at, etc. Just focus on writing good content. There are several great methods you can use to promote your content once it is published.

  • Find other industry blogs and comment on them; make sure to leave quality comments, not spam
  • Try to write guest posts on other blogs
  • E-mail blog aggregator sites and make a case for you why you should be on them (e.g. alltop.com)
  • If you are on twitter, you can tell your friends about your blog (do not spam)
  • You can update your “status” on facebook with new blog posts (do not spam)
  • Put your blog URL in the signature of your e-mails
  • Put the blog URL on your business cards

If you use common sense with a little bit of savvy marketing, there is no reason why you can’t rank well for your name in just a few months. Remember to focus on providing quality content, make something that provides some sort of value to the readers. You may also want to check out my post on “How I got Indexed in search engines in under 24 hours”and “Trying to Promote Your Blog? BlogUpp! May Have a Solution

If you have any additional suggestions or ideas I would love to hear them.

Thanks for reading!

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