I admit it, I search for my name a lot. Firstname Lastname, click, send, wait, smile! It’s exciting to see what the search engines find most relevant about me. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should. Everybody likes to feel important or at the very
least less obscure and more accessible online to friends, loved ones, fans, viewers, colleagues you name it.
What’s interesting is the distinctly different types of websites and information that the top 3 (Google, MSN, and Yahoo) return in response to a firstname lastname search. Now a lot of these differences are not specific to a name search and would fit in the categories of convtionial SEO, but the reasons why I think it’s important to talk about this specific search separately from regular SEO are:
1. This search is one of the most important to an individual emotionally. Your first and last name appears on everything you create. It can represent your reputation, your family heritage, your professional image, your expertise, and your experience, all at the same time. Give me another two search words that cover all of that.
2. People use their first and last name in documents and websites in similar ways that differ extensively from other words Most of us, for example, don’t have social networking accounts, blogs, press releases, work history, persona.comments and video files all attached to a string of keywords like buy movies now.
Recently, do to the pending release of free movie Boy Who Never Slept and an aggressive marketing campaign, references to ‘solomon rothman’ have increased dramatically and span many different sources. Giving this I thought it would be a perfect time to do a searc.comparison on the different types of results to get some perspective on name searches and what each of the search engines prefer.
Initial things to note:
1. My myspace account is very new with almost to no outside links pointing at it.
2. I use my real name solomonrothman in my usernames for website profile pages. Examples of this are below.
myspace.com/solomonrothmanen.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Solomonrothman
Search results by each engine for solomon rothman
On MSN (results summarized in bullets
