Beyond The Net
How do you look online?
By Janine Warner
You never know who might search for you on the Internet before your next business meeting, interview, or blind date. The question is what will they find?
If you're concerned about your personal or professional reputation, you should pay attention to your online image. You should also know that you can take steps to tell your own story and even correct things that might mislead people.
But first you have to search for yourself to know what's there. Direct your browser to www.google.com (by far the most popular search engine online today) and type your full name into the search field.
You may be amazed at how often your name appears in places you didn't even know you were listed, from alumni directories, to professional membership listings, to conferences you've attended.
And it may not all be good.
You may find the description of a job you had five years ago that is outdated and misleading. You may be embarrassed to find sites featuring photos of you from a wild Halloween party or a drunken night on Miami Beach. You may also discover that there are people in the world with your same name and that information about them online may lead to confusion.
MIAMI EXAMPLES
For fun, I searched Google for a couple of Miami colleagues. The Fred Jackson I know is a member of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce executive committee and works for IBM. He may not realize it, but the top matches on Google for the name Fred Jackson are for a horticulturist with a radio program about gardening and an 83-year-old, baby-faced jazz vocalist. Fred's not that old. I don't know if he can garden or sing, but the point is if I didn't already know something about Fred, I might have been confused by those findings and never realized he works for IBM. That's something he should consider fixing (I've included a few suggestions below).
I also searched for the name of my friend Brian Nelson. Google returned a website for a Brian Nelson who is a fashion photographer; another for an associate professor at the University of Washington, and a third with this direct quote from the Google listing: ''Featured Profile: Brian Nelson, Original Speakeasy Support Technician.'' I'm not even sure what that means, but it was the sixth match, and I'm sure it has nothing to do with the Brian Nelson I know. He's an attorney in Miami and a specialist in Internet business and intellectual property law.
I recommend Brian highly, and I also recommend he take a few steps to improve his online image.
Although you may not be able to change other people's websites or listings, you can at least find out what people might mistakenly discover when they look up your name.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The most important thing is to make sure that when someone searches for your name, they find the story you want to tell. Here are a few suggestions:
- Register your own name as a domain name. Most search engines give the higher priority to keywords when they match domain names, so if you own your own domain name you can improve the rank of your page in a search engine. The best deal for domain-name registration I've found is www.godaddy.com. Godaddy also enables you to forward the domain name to any page on the Internet for free.
Here's an example of how this could work. My friend Brian Nelson's bio does appear on the website of his law firm. You can find it by visiting the law firm's site and searching for his name in the attorney listings. But that page didn't turn up in the top matches when I did a search on Google because Brian's name doesn't appear anywhere in the Web address for his page. And, like many company sites, the way the page is created further confuses search engines.
If Brian were to register his own domain name and forward it to his page on his company's Web site, he could help ensure that people find his bio more easily when they search for him online. (Anyone can register and forward a domain name, and it's pretty easy with a registrar like Godaddy.)
- If your bio or resume are not online already, consider creating a personal page or website. Many commercial sites enable you to post a resume or create a simple page for free, such as the kind you can create at http://geocities.yahoo.com. Again, if you have your own domain name, you can forward your own address to that page and make your site easier to find.
- If you find information that is outdated or incorrect, don't hesitate to contact the owners of the offending site and request that they change the information. Sometimes old job information and other misleading data remain online just because no one has bothered to take it down. A simple email request or phone call is often all that's needed to bring your online image up to date.
First publication, The Miami Herald, Mon, Jan. 27, 2003
