'Googling' made it into the dictionary alongside Hoover to describe the act
of using the proprietary, popular product. So 'Auto-googling' is exploring your
own biography.
This vote of confidence is not
extended to many products. Not many cleaning products or purveyors of food have
achieved this. I think the Boeing aircraft company nearly made it when their
707, 727, 737 and 747 planes shrank the world. But marketing words like tri-jet,
bus-jet and jumbo stopped us ‘boeing’ the world.
Auto-googling is creeping into use for those who turn to the 'No1 people’s
search engine' to create an ephemeral draft of their autobiography. But the
rude truth for the over 30s is that they are probably invisible on the web. They
may feel that their achievements entitle them to a significant place in the
cyber-ranking but the search engines that index the web are probably unaware of
their existence.
One solution is to adopt a new name. Parents might be tempted to gift
their offspring with a unique selling point (USP) by inventing a name. If the
poor kid survives the playground with their confidence intact, the name might be
seen as a marginal advantage, but coming out on top of the bottom division where
you are the only competitor is a dubious honour.
You can of course cheat and actually change your name. So don’t assume
that your friends who are determined to crawl to the centre of the world wide web
have necessarily spelt their name wrong. Jonh Doe is not necessarily a dyslexic
branch of the fictitious family. But the same rule applies. The search engine
will find you and even rank you pretty high if you call yourself Donkinge Doe
but you are in a league all of your own. Ask yourself; will anybody else know
that is how I spell my name?
An acceptable solution is to adopt a cyber identity which works well for
the young who are happy to slice-up their personality and inhabit several
domains in the cyber world. The kids have no trouble being snappyhappy in
their blog, brightdeath on a Goth forum and Petra Smith in real life.
This solution is not going to satisfy the pompous aspirations of a middle-aged
banker who wants to be the world’s top Google for John Smith and would find it
hard to accept that they are different people at work, play and at home.
Well, good luck to John Smith, there is some serious competition out for almost
every name you can imagine. Coming from a generation that has been brought up to
‘beat the competition’, he is likely to set off in the wrong direction for the
Internet. On the web you win by being better, not by destroying the competitors.
Here are a few things you can try to boost your recognition.
Identity
So the first thing is to sort out your cyber identity. If you are known as Tom,
Thomas, Tommy and Tomo Smith, you are making life hard for yourself. Use one
name and make sure that it is included in all you contributions to the web.
Blogging
Maintaining an interesting blog is proving a good way to attract and keep visitors.
That will keep the search engines happy. If you wash the underwear of
celebrities you are guaranteed a great readership for your blog, especially from
lawyers. But if you are able to provide a running commentary on any aspect of
life you will get a readership. You can help yourself by building up a network
of buddies, although the over 30s might find this aspect awkward. Make sure you
include your name in the text.
Links
The search engines wisely hide the precise way their ranking works to prevent
abuse, but Google is very open about the few fundamentals of their ranking
algorithm. Popularity is the key. If you are on a popular site, or you have lots
of links to your site, you are off to a good start. But after that it is down to
the global surfers. If lots of people visit your site, or better still, stay on
your site and use it to link elsewhere, the dispassionate search engine will be
impressed.
Content
So the good news is that the system is remarkably democratic. Celebrity
attracts, but content is king. Good content makes your site sticky. Porn is more
popular than origami so you have to decide how far you are prepared to go. Good
luck. Those with delusions of grandeur are going to be disappointed. Quality
slowly rises to the top and there are ways you can help your ranking. If you are
interested in weaving or kite-flying, track down all the sites that sell related
products or act as an aggregator for your hobby, and make sure they know about
you. Do not do this on day 1 but wait until you have built up some content that
will impress.
Promotion
You can rent, but not buy, loyalty. If you buy the rights to play some music or
video clip visitors will flood in, but vanish just as quickly. Viral marketing
can work well. Knowledge of something that is worth visiting can spread rapidly
around the net (like a virus). If they find material that is of interest then
they might return, so sort out some good content before organising any stunt to
draw people into your site.
In the cyberworld, there a billions of identities. The delusion of world
domination remains the unspoken agenda of the megalomaniacs that the world
still produces. It is time we got over this evolutionary hang-over. The struggle
to dominate and become the alpha-ape had a survival value a thousand generations
ago. It is time to evolve and the web might be the place where mankind can do
it.
Let’s welcome a place where the weak and strong, short as well as the
tall, the rich and the poor can co-exist. So be patient. It takes years for your
identity to embed itself on the web and then make its way up the rankings. And
finally, be humble. It really is a very big and diverse world.
Quality v Quantity
The invisible web
Research Advance search
'auto google' Google Print
©Chas Jones 2007
