Hello,

Thanks for stopping by my website. Here you will always find truth and at times, brutal honesty. I will discuss everything that is bearing on me, my family and my online ventures. At times I may blatantly promote a product but for the most part, I will not make any endorsements.

I have been online since 2000 and have witness the internet landscape change and grow. I have always attempted to change and grow with it but I must admit that at times, I have lagged behind.

My latest journey is learning everything I can about how to protect one’s reputation and/or brand online. With the proliferation of so-called complaints sites, I have learned that it is more important that ever for one to remain vigilant and safeguard ones own reputation and/or brand. The internet is vast and expansive and one never really the things that are being said about one. It is very easy for an angry ex, jealous husband/wife or anyone one you may have come across in your daily encounters to anonymously post negative things that can have very serious consequences. Such are the times in which we live.

But everything is no so clandestine or covert. There are also wonderful things going on around us everyday that we are alive. There are opportunities to forge new friends and find new and exciting things online.

In the 10 years that I have been online I have traversed the pop up banner craze, survived the spam epidemic and witness the birth of new amazing trends and platforms online. And yet, the journey is just beginning.

I hope that some surfers find this site and think it is worth coming back again, because I know that it is a ton of fun for me. Ok cyberspace, until next we meet.

Added November 4, 2010

I have been talking about the importance of protecting one’s reputation on line for a few months now, see for example rep-guard.com. I have also been talking about the significance in registering your name, if you can, as your own domain. The same reasons I have been focusing on are elaborated on here in a blog post entitled “Why Ranking for Your Own Name Is Important” which I found while surfing the net today. It is from a June 2010 post by Kathleen K. O’Connor, O’Copy.com

I hope you enjoy it and if you do, please visit her blog and subscribe to her newsletter.

Why Ranking for Your Own Name Is Important

Written by Kathleen on June 26, 2010

One of the first things people will do after they meet you online or consider hiring you is Google your name. They’ll read your comments on blogs that show up in the search results and check out your social media profiles and interactions to see if there’s anything you ‘forgot’ to tell them.

So, make your Facebook profile pictures private. You don’t want a potential client to find a random tagged pic of you passed out in a puddle of your own vomit at your friend’s birthday party last weekend.

All kidding aside, people search for your name because they want to learn more about you; the contents of your About Us page just don’t cut it. Your About Us page contains information you want everyone to know, but it usually reflects the polished version of you that you want to present to clients.

Some people hope that by googling your name, they’ll be able to dig up some juicy details about your life. In other cases, they simply want to see what other people are saying about you online because what other people say about you has more weight than what you say about yourself.

Why Ranking for Your Name Is Important

People will search for your name online, whether you like it or not. At the very least, if you actively try to rank for your name, you can control, to some extent, what people read about you online. You can also knock negative results off the front page of search results and bury them under positive results that give searchers a good impression of you and your business.

Once, I had to write SEO content for a client who had the same name as someone on an FBI most wanted list. Every time someone googled him, they came away thinking that he was a fugitive drug lord. This guy was obviously upset, so he used the power of SEO to his advantage to rank for his name and mend his reputation.

On another occasion I googled a client’s name and was shocked to find some porno websites in the results. Of course I had to click through to see if it was really her. I was relieved to find out that my client wasn’t appearing in films like Ocean’s 11 Inches and Sick Degrees of Penetration during off hours, but these situations go to show that reputation management is reason enough to take ranking for your own name very seriously!

How to Rank for Your Own Name

If you’re lucky enough to have an unusual last name or your parents were hippies, it won’t be hard for you to rank for your name and build your personal brand. People with names like Alexia Petrakos and Fabeku Fatunmise are lucky when it comes to online personal branding because they aren’t competing with anyone else to rank for their names. On the other hand, if your name is Mike Smith or Jennifer Jones, you’re going to have some work ahead of you if you want to build an online presence around your name.

Whether you have a common name or you’d like remnants of your bad online behavior to disappear from the first page of Google, do the following:

* Optimize your website content for your name
* Optimize your website content for your name plus your profession (e.g. Jim Jenson photographer or Lisa Johnson writer)
* Write press releases about your business with your name in them
* Add your middle initial to differentiate your name
* Create several profiles at well ranking social media sites like LinkedIn, Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook
* Use a different name altogether

I have noticed in my Google Analytics reports that people often search for my name and business name to find my website. Or perhaps they are trying to find more information about me and happen to stop by my site in the process. My problem is that I have a very common name, thanks to Irish naming patterns. Google Kathleen O’Connor and you’ll see what I mean.

I used to optimize everything for the name Kathleen K. O’Connor. But a business consultant I worked with told me that I should try to rank for Kathleen O’Connor since most people won’t bother typing that middle initial. So, I switched all the names on my site and social media profiles to Kathleen O’Connor, hoping that would do the trick.

Unfortunately, since there are far too many Kathleen O’Connor’s in the English-speaking world, I’m buried in the search results now. I’ve decided to go back to using the name Kathleen K. O’Connor because ranking for Kathleen K. O’Connor is better than ranking for nothing! And since I noticed that my cousin’s actor husband uses a middle initial in his name and it gets lots of searches, I figured that it wasn’t a bad route to take.

Although I often wish that I pulled a Johnny B. Truant and gave myself a cool pen name like Kaye O’Copy just to rank, people already know me as Kathleen, so Kathleen K. O’Connor it is.

What about you? What name do you use for your online presence? Do you have Google Analytics installed so you can determine what keywords people are using to find your website on Google?