Thursday, February 11, 2010

Getting "Jep" on Page 1

I have a fairly unique first name: "Jep". I think I know 2 people in the entire world with the same first name, one in Denmark and one in the US. So it would be cool if my site popped up if you search for "Jep": a little bit of personal branding :-)

I was interested in the Internet pretty early on, so I tried to register domain names with my name in it, which is a good start for personal branding. Unfortunately I was too late to register jep.com, but I could claim castelein.net and jepcastelein.com.

In the past years I learned a fair bit about Search Engine Optimization. If you Google "Jep Castelein", you find pretty-much all my sites, and even if you Google "Castelein" I show up in 4 out of 10 spots.

However, if you Google "Jep", my sites on are page 2. I find it a personal challenge to get on the first page of the Google search results. I recently registered the domain jep.name, which uses one of the new top-level domains. It may not be as good as jep.com, but it should definitely help.

On jep.name I've created a personal profile page using a service called Retaggr. I've added all my social networking sites, and several options to get in touch with me.

On all my other websites I have created links to this new profile page, using "Jep" as the link text. This tells Google that the site is about Jep (see also the miserable failure story). Hopefully we'll see some results in a couple of weeks!

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