If you’re attempting to repair your reputation that is personal online, chances are you have already figured out that you might need one or more websites dedicated to your name to help displace something negative in the search engine results.
Beyond setting up YourName.com, what other alternatives are there? Here are a couple secrets that could help you get the search results all gleaming again with less effort!
As part of great, proactive online reputation management and personal branding, I advise that everyone should own the basic “YourName.com” domain, particularly if one’s name is unique. In case your name is not unusual, like “John Smith,” it may not demand as much proactive concern, but it would still be useful and recommended to set yourself up with a domain that features your proper name.
Some use this as a place to park their resumes on the internet, and I’ve seen folks simply redirect their name domain names that are proper to Facebook pages or their LinkedIn profiles. You must own your name as a defensive measure to keep it from being obtained to pan you, if you ever run into a hater or a crazy person.
It happened to me, I’m speaking about this from personal experience, unfortunately, since I once had someone register my professional name as a kind of risk to try to tarnish my name online. It was a very uncommon scenario. I had long managed my personal domain name as “silvery.com,” which was intended to be clever and is closely similar to my nickname, Silver.
I’d believed the domain was just great for my personal branding; it didn’t occur to me that I might want other domain name assets to safeguard myself from strikes.
Apparently, a person who I ‘d encountered at an organization that I had previously consulted for felt endangered by my SEO knowledge and, perhaps due to professional jealousy, decided to start setting up “ChrisSilverSmith.com” to take me down a few notches.
(Actually, I hadn’t ever done anything to hurt nor demean this individual, and I ‘d gone out of my way to be considerate to them despite some aggressive moves on their part.)
Out of the blue one day, I found ChrisSilverSmith.com to be rating in Google a page or two back in the results. There was one page on the site, with video of a hilarious sequence from a popular online multiplayer game on it or an animated GIF.
I didn’t know at first if it was the first move in a hostile reputation assault campaign or if it was thought to be a joke. The enrollment details were proxied, obviously, to conceal them.
I considered what to do such as legal options but, I was initially determined not to allow the individual the satisfaction of focus, and I knew that I could use my experience as well as resources to keep the domain name from affecting my professional work, if necessary.
How it turned out
Ultimately, I gently approached the individuals diffused the situation involved and persuaded them to relinquish the domain name, turning over ownership to me. No risks, no legal action. But a lot of folks in such a scenario aren’t that lucky, and I realized how silly I had been not to have already registered my full name as a domain name.
In case you have any public persona whatsoever, you ought to proactively register your name as .COM, when it is available. I’ve understood a great deal of colleagues who’ve also faced brief, unwarranted assaults on the internet, and I’ve coped with several reputation customers who actually should have already been managing a website paired up with a domain name optimized to be important for their personal name.
Maybe you simply want one domain name if you’re doing this proactively. But if you’re working to mitigate an attack on yourself, you might find setting up a modest handful of domain names is more beneficial than setting up merely your main one.
What to do if it happens to you
Either way, one question that often comes up is, “ if MyName.com is not available, What should I do?” Here are a few of my secret strategies to assist you maximize how powerful your efforts will be.
The first, most basic principle is the fact that a domain name that is an exact match for your name will likely be the most favorable. Google and several other search engines have a look at the key words when appraising how important a website is to a user’s search query located in domain names, and the closer the match, the easier it is for the site.
Google has worked to strive to be certain that “official” sites for brands and people may rank highest for name searches, so in the event you get a precise match domain name, the bar for reaching rankings is lower. Negative contents are commonly only a page on another website, such as on RipoffReport.com, or perhaps Yelp, or horrific folks-panning websites like MyEx.com.
Since those sites don’t have your name as a domain name, you will get an immediate edge over them in position factors with your personalized domain.
I’ve as I did for myself run into many situations where people have used adorable domain names for their personal websites. Don’t make that blunder, as it won’t help in a standing assault scenario.
If your name is “John Smith,” then “JohnsHappyFunPlayhouse.com” is not definitely going to be helpful. Yes, you may get a website with an alternate domain name to rank for your name searches, but nevertheless, it can demand more effort in other places.
When you begin hunting on a domain registrar site, like GoDaddy.com, they will often propose many top-level domain (TLD) alternatives to the “.COM” one. Some of these work a lot better than others, depending in your circumstance. If you have a common name, the .COM choice might be unavailable to you — so my suggestions for these choices will probably be crucial for you.
Incidentally, folks frequently inquire if they ought to use their full name versus the more casual variations they use in private life. It’s common while requesting people to utilize a shortened, recognizable variant in day-to-day interactions to use your full name in your resume. For instance, should I use “ChristopherSmith.com” or “ChrisSmith.com”?
The answer to this is: Make use of the name which has been used in any standing strike online along with the variation that individuals will be often seeking upon. Should you go by both, you may need to be conducting standing-strengthening efforts for every name version.
In addition it’s possible by comprising both names in multiple SEO signals and the site’s text content to optimize just one website for both name editions. But mainly, you just need to focus on the name that individuals are trying to find.
10 online standing domain name secrets
1. First, start with the grand-daddy standard domain of them all: .COM — The dot-com TLD is exceptionally successful and preferable to register first as your primary website if it’s accessible. There are multiple motives it’s successful: It’s one of the longest-established TLDs; it is the most-recognized top-level domain of all by both individuals and machines; and it operates great from a marketing/branding standpoint, in addition to from a technical perspective.
If “YourName.com” is already taken, however, don’t despair. In some instances, minor name variations may function equally well.
For example, dashes are permitted characters in domain names, and they may be properly used to delimit between first and last names, as in “Your-Name.com.” Many optimization pros prevent this out of anxiety that search engines may assess it to be a suspect domain name and lower in quality and trustworthiness. Since dashed domains can operate nicely, however, these anxieties might be mostly unjustified.
Adding just a few letters close to the ending of the name can operate nicely, also, in certain circumstances. Largely, avoid tacking on additional words or letters, though, or you also start eroding your exact-match domain name edge. If your alternatives are limited, longer domain names/URLs operate worse in search engines only adding very few letters should be considered.
2. .NET, .BIZ, .US, .ORG — Should you search for your name with the majority of registrars, they’re likely to list these TLDs as options for you. Generally, each one of these can operate reasonably well, closely similar to .COM.
They can work fairly well as straightforward, strong TLD extensions on a proper name domain, although I’d say that generally, none of these confer any advantages that are specialized. (One of my close friends has operated “John.org” since 1998, but I think he mainly maintains it merely for his email address. It does really rank very well for some queries, which is slightly surprising, since there’s no optimization set into it, and it’s not in any respect focused on his full name.)
3. Treat yourself to a .ME domain name — While this is technically the TLD for the country of Montenegro, the government there decided to manage it as a Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD), because they understood that it held a broad commercial appeal worldwide, since “Me” is the English self-referencing pronoun.
Domains with the .ME extension can operate very well in search results, as well as the extension has an adequate level of recognizability. It’s not long; it makes sense; it seems to convey that it’s managed by the individual bearing the name used in the domain — it’s just elegant!
A related option with differing advantages is always to use the Around.me service to set up a profile page for yourself at Around.me/Your.Name; this service has inbuilt website design/publishing abilities and probably has some degree of rank capabilities, fresh out of the box.
4. Geographical TLDs — Examples of Geographical TLDs: YourName.NYC, YourName.Miami, YourName.Paris. A common case for this is when well known proprietors of local businesses may be searched for with higher frequency in their own cities than elsewhere, and Google will present different search result positions according to geography for this reason.
For example, generally in most places in america, if you seek for “Chris Silver Smith,” my site is likely to come up on top of search results (since I discuss nationwide at conferences and work professionally nationwide). However, in case you search in the Miami area, Google is more likely to present web pages about a lawyer, Chris Silversmith, who lives and works there.
In the event that you’re best known in your local area, one excellent option for you’d be to set up a private web site using a GeoTLD that’s in sync by means of your geography. So Chris Silversmith could leverage his location associatively by setting up a personal web page on “ChrisSilversmith.miami,” and it would probably rank quite positively in search results.
My research indicates that these GeoTLDs perform fairly advantageously in search results that are local, and Search Engine Optimization strategist Bill Hartzer has had similar findings.
