Branding Yourself With Google Panda - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Branding Yourself With Google Panda - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career The Google Panda updates has changed a lot of what companies are doing to ensure theyre being found on Google for their particular field and keywords. But how can you take advantage of this for personal branding? Take advantage of Google Panda 1. Define your keywords The first thing to do is to define what you want to be known for. Choose a couple short keywords and phrases. Just know that youre going to have a tough time ranking for most of these, but you want to get your name associated with them so when someone finds you, they see youre associated with this as well. It could be beer, writing, social media, or even marketing. Whether its your work or your passions, be sure your name is being associated with those keywords. Start a blog about it, tweet about it, join LinkedIn groups about it. You wont win any searches for this term, but if people find you, theyll see the keyword associated with your name on those social properties, and you may fit a category theyre looking for. 2. Find your long-tail keywords There are things youre more known for than a single keyword. Maybe its a three- or four-word phrase. Instead of beer, its home brewed wheat beer. Instead of writing, its young adult science fiction. These are the terms people are more likely to search for. You wont win thousands of searches, but you could win 20 searches in a single month. And those 20 people are looking for exactly what you have to offer. The thousands you missed out on werent looking for that, and so you just saved yourself a bunch of wasted effort. Pick the two or three long-tail keywords youre known for, and use them on your blog, in your Twitter bio, and on your LinkedIn profile. If you have any other social profiles, use them there too. This is the true essence of branding yourself: finding that specific niche that you want to be known for, instead of the vague, generic term everyone else is using. 3. Localize your profile Google is starting to pay a lot of attention to local search results. If you search for something that can be found locally, thats what Google will show you first. If someone searches for something you do, and your blog or website is localized properly, youll pop up before other people who arent doing this. Start mentioning your city and state in your blog posts. Make sure its on your Twitter profile. Make sure its even in your LinkedIn profile. Write blog posts about home brewed wheat beer in Ann Arbor, Michigan or the Portland, Oregon young adult science fiction conference. Even if someone does a search for the long-tail keyword and skips the city name, youll show up if theyre local. And if theyre from out of town, but theyre looking for something in your city, youll still show up. If youre really adventurous, start poking around in some of the Schema markup language. Learn how to mark up the city and state where you are, and drop that into your blog footer. Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all using schemas for indexing, so youll be helping yourself on all three search engines. And your blog and posts will start showing up during localized searches more frequently than those people who arent using it at all. 4. Connect with people on Google+ You may keep hearing that Google+ is failing, or not generating the attention that people thought it deserved. While that may be true, Google+ is still playing a very important role in search. And if you want to win search, you cant ignore it. Lets say were connected on Google+. I go searching for something, like home brewed wheat beer. One of the first things Google will show me is your blog post on that very subject. Similarly, if were not connected, but we have a mutual connection, and he shared your blog post on wheat beer, that post will still show up at the top of my search results page. Given all of that, it behooves you to connect with people on Google+ who share your interest, or are connected to the people you want to connect with, or both. The more people youre connected with, and the more you can get people to share your stuff (because youre writing high-quality sharable content), the more likely you are to show up in their search rankings. Also, make sure you put your rel=author tag in your blog bio, and link it to your Google+ profile. This will tell Google that you wrote that particular piece of content, and that youre the same you on Google+. These are just a few basic tips you can use for branding yourself by taking advantage of Googles latest algorithm updates. Focus on long-tail searches, being local, and being connected with people who are likely to search for you, and youll come out on top. Author: Erik Deckers is the owner of Professional Blog Service. He also just used the rel=author tag and linked to his Google+ profile. He is the co-author of Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself, and No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing.