Googled Yourself Lately? 10 Ways to Look Good on Google

You’re probably not the only one. Google is often the first place we go when we want to find out more about a person or a company. The good news is that you don’t have to be a victim of what other people post about you. If you’re active online, you actually have quite a lot of control over what comes up in those search results.

Give Google Nice Things to Say About You

You can’t control the specific results that pop up in the search results. But you can make sure that Google has positive things about you to show people. Just be aware that most of the things you post publically are being recorded by the search engine bots and use that information in your favour.

How Does Google Collect Information

Google, Bing, Yahoo and all of the search engines have bots that continuously troll the Web for information. They gather information from your public profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and everything you write publicly on the Web. That means you can put lots of positive and helpful information in different places all over the Web for the search engines to find.

Ten Ways to Look Good on Google

1. Get a Google account for Gmail. Fill out your Google profile with a personal tagline, an introduction to who you are and what you do. Add links to your social media accounts and websites that you own such as your business or your e-resume portfolio site. Include keywords about your skills and area of expertise.
2. Post your resume! If you use Google Docs, remember to make your resume document public.
3. Join Google+. Now that you have a Google account you can join Google+ and use the Google+ button to add your favorite web pages and blog posts to your Google+ page. If you’re job hunting, this is a great place to demonstrate that you are staying on top of the trends in your field.
4. Complete your LinkedIn profile with a friendly portrait of yourself and lots of keywords about your skills
5. Get a Twitter account.  Search engines will show your Twitter Profile and they might even post some of your tweets. If you’re job hunting, be careful what you tweet.
6. Tweak your Facebook profile. Join and participated in Fan Pages that are releate to your area of expertise. BeKnown is a great Facebook app from Monster to help job seekers to get found on Facebook.
7. Participate in Support Forums and special interest groups. Your posts in support forums like WordPress.org and Sitepoint.com might pop up in search results.
8. Comment on blog posts. Follow blogs that are related to your profession and comment on posts you find interesting. Comments you have posted on blog posts might appear in the search results. Especially if you associate your comment with your Google Gmail account.
9. Join sites where you can share stuff. Reddit, Zoomit.ca, Stumbleupon, Sprouter, Slideshare, and Youtube are places where you can share things that search engines may post their search results.
10. Create a Squidoo Lens about a topic related to your work. Squidoo is a great place to put up a mini site to share anything you care about. http://www.squidoo.com

These are just ten strategies that I use. There are many many more places on the web where you can post things that will pop up when someone “googles” you. What did I miss that you would put in your top ten?