SEO and Building Your Personal Brand

Online reputation management is a very important aspect of recruiting. When investigating a somebody, the most people use Google. Rather than having a results page full of information about that somebody, or neutral—or even worse, negative—listings about that person.

It’s not as difficult to influence Google search results for your own name, although the task will be far much difficult for some than others. If you are an SEO named Topm Cruise then I’d recommend changing your name!
There are clearly certain types of results that professionals want to appear for a search. And it’s great if you can control as many of the top ten listings as possible, and ideally you want this to consist of company profile pages, media mentions and so on.

You can use social media to help ensure ranking as highly as possible in Google for your “personal brand.”

Blogging - Have an author profile page which is linked to from each of your posts as this helps to build the strength and relevancy of your profile page to increase search rankings for queries on your name.

Guest blogging - Write guest posts for some of the top blogs which you admire within your industry but also make yourself available for interviews or blogger profiles.

Twitter - Interact within the community by adding value to online conversations and building a trusted profile
Business social media networking - These are great sites to show a professional profile containing your career history to browsing users, letting them know straight away the company you are currently working for, if people are looking to contact or reconnect with you.

Online presentations - This will allow people to view and download your presentations, plus it’s another chance to optimize for your name (or company name) and show that you are a highly respected speaker.

Online video - If someone is searching for more information about you and can find an online video presentation, this could go a long way towards enhancing your reputation to the searcher.

Social media networking - The obvious ones are profile pages on sites such as Facebook (grab that vanity URL!), Flickr, Digg and StumbleUpon.

Just follow these tips and you should be dominating a Google query for your personal in next to no time!