measure your google footprint before breakfast

What do you see when you Google yourself? The only guarantee is that whatever turns up, others see it too. In fact, a quick Google search offers an easy first-round background check for everyone from clients and employers to singles and private investigators.

Social Media Marketing

Sneak A Peak

It’s a good idea to take a peak at your Google footprint from time to time. It’s easy enough to do. Simply type your name into the Google search field and put quotes around it to weed out superfluous results. If you have a fairly common name, you may have to click through quite a few results pages to find links related to the right you. (Sorry, John Smith.) But if you include a modifier, a keyword or phrase that may be uniquely associated with your name - John Smith doctor or John Smith tiger trainer – you’ll get filtered results quickly. If your name is more distinct, chances are you don’t need a modifier and you’ll quickly come face-to-face with your online past and present - the good, the bad and the embarrassing.

So what do you do if you see, as everyone else does, those less-than-impressive results of a triathlon you participated in six years ago? Or a malpractice lawsuit that got quite a bit of coverage on the Web, a lawsuit against some other Dr. John Smith?

Maintain

Maintaining your Google footprint might be important to you, and in the age of social media, it’s certainly gotten easier. The idea is to provide fresh, updated material to the search engines, which will appear at the top of the results pages each time someone searches your name. While the older material won’t go away, consistent updates and contributions will push most of the less desirable material further down the results pages.

Here are some ideas:

  • Join and contribute to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter. Portions of your profile are indexed by the search engines and show up when someone Googles you. The size and popularity of the larger social media sites seems to keep individual profile links high on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
  • Contribute to forums and message boards associated with your industry or interests. When you register, use your full name whenever possible.
  • If you have a personal website or a website for your own organization, be sure your name is mentioned on the About page, your Bio page and any other pages where it may be appropriate. If possible, have your name included in the URL of your About page. Words and phrases appearing in URLs are considered to be important sources of information for search engines.
  • Sign up for a simple-to-use social blogging service like Vox.com. These services allow you to easily post photos and musings from a mobile phone, and an undemanding but steady stream of posts (once a week, once a month) can do wonders. When you set up your account, be sure to put your full name somewhere in the blog’s main title, and when appropriate, include your full name in the title of your posts.
  • Turn the things you write for business or pleasure into short articles and publish them online. Use article syndication services like EzineArticles.com. These services allow you to publish for free and to include a byline. You can even include a link back to your website or blog using your name as the anchor text for the link.
  • Tag, tag, tag. Whenever you have the opportunity to tag anything online - a picture, a video, an article you post - consider including your full name as one of the tags.
  • Create your own public profile on Google. They make it easy.

Again, the idea is to provide an ample amount of information to the search engines in order to keep less relevant information pushed down in the SERPs when people search your name.

Businesses Have Footprints Too

The Google footprint for a business can be determined the same way we determine a footprint for an individual: simply type the business name into the search bar. But if the business has a website, there are even more ways to measure its footprint.

The search engines offer advanced operators to help you refine and improve your search and help you research how your site is doing. And they’re easy.

Which Pages of My Site Are Being Indexed?
It’s always good to know which pages of your site the search engines are indexing, or more importantly, which ones they’re not. After all, if a page is not being indexed, it will not come up in any search results. To find out which pages of your site are being indexed, use the “site:” operator.

In the Google search field (not the address bar), type “site:yoursitename.com” without the quotes and with no spaces and no “www,” and then press enter/return. You’ll see at the top the total number of pages that have been indexed by Google, and most of those pages will be listed in the results.

Who's Linking to My Website?
One of the most important factors search engines consider when calculating the relevance of a page is how many other websites link to it. How many websites link to pages on your site? Again, it’s easy to find out.

This time in a Yahoo! search field (not Google), type:

link:http://www.yoursitename.com

Be sure there are no spaces, and then press enter/return. Near the top of the page you'll see two drop-down menus next to the phrase "Show Inlinks." From these menus, choose "Except from this domain" and "Entire Site."

On the left you'll see the number of pages from elsewhere on the Web that link to pages on your site. The more links you have from reputable sites, particularly sites that are related to yours in some way, the higher the search engines will rank your site.

External links are considered by most SEO professionals to be the most important ranking factor for websites. So how do you get inbound links? There are a number of ways, some of which may me more suitable for your purposes than others. Please contact us for more information on external links.

Website Navigation

If you see that the search engines do not index a lot of your pages, there’s a good chance they’ve never seen them. Good site navigation is not only important to users, it’s important to the search engines as well. Make sure links to all the pages on your site are no more than two clicks away. If possible, create a sitemap and link to it from the footer of each page. Your visitor will love it, and the search engines will have no excuses.