Just look at the results for my name. The first page of Google Results for my name is dominated by me. All links are related to me in some way or the other, with none of those which will earn me a negative reputation from someone.

Google Search results for the term "Vinay Swastik"

In the recent scenario, you just cannot afford to ignore this, and you must monitor the search results for your name, and have knowledge on how they got there. This applies to all, whether a businessman or a student who is just going to start his career or any other individual. It is simply because of the increasing trend to Google about the person after the first meeting.

So, you need to remain prepared for it. You must at least know how to control it.

I will just give an outline on how to dominate Google Results for your name.

First Step: The Social Networking Buzz

1. Signup to Facebook.
2. Make your Professional Profile at LinkedIn.
3. Filling out your Google Profile can be a great help.

Social Networking is a pretty good way to connect with your friends and family and also with your professional contacts. The information you will provide on the profiles will help the search engines to present your profiles in search results for your ‘name’ as a keyword.

Second Step: Connect to the outer world

1. Start a blog. You can get a free blog at WordPress or Blogger or you can have it on your own domain (like me)
2. Sign up for Twitter

Having a personal blog is like having your own house on the www. Your blog can be the thing that will distinguish you from others. You can use twitter also. It depends on you if you want to express yourself in simple 140 characters, or you want to write small posts in blog, or you can write till your fingers bleed on the same blog.

Third Step: Explore the Internet, be Social

1. Spread your name on the web.
2. Increase interaction by other bloggers.
3. Visit the online communities and Forums.

Interact with the persons who share the same interests as yourself. You can comment on their blogs, and get comments on your blog in return. You can visit the various forums which discuss topics that interest you, and take active part in the ongoing discussions there.

When you do this, you will spread links of your blog, your twitter facebook and other profiles, on the various web pages. These scattered links are counted as incoming links to your blog or profile by the search engines, which will increase the ‘importance’ of these.

By following some or all of the above steps, start controlling and optimization of the brand “YOU” before you get too late.

The reason behind this is the recent PageRank (PR in short)update by Google. My twitter profile acquired a PageRank of 4 (on a 10 point scale), in the PageRank update of 30th October 2009. This time, the PR update came amidst a lot of  conjectures on various webmaster discussion forums that the PR system is discontinued by Google.

Vinay Swastik's Twitter profile gets a Google PageRank-4

I hope that this blog of mine would also get a PR in the next update. It has been 15 days only since I registered the vinayswastik.com domain, so I wasn’t expecting PR so early on this domain.

What is PageRank?

There is a ranking system used by Google to rank the web pages based on their relative popularity on web. This is known as PageRank. This was originally started as a project at Stanford University. Google acquired it as trademark in 2005, though the patent still resides with Stanford.

According to the definition given by Stanford -

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting (on a 10 or 100 point scale) to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents (or simply, a web page) , such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

In PageRank, more the number better is the rank, e.g. PageRank 8/10 is better than PageRank 2/10

The actual calculations of PR system are pretty complex (couldn’t have expected any better by Stanford) and can be found on Wikipedia.

The homepage of Google.com stands at PR-10, Official website of Indian Government also holds PR-10, twitter homepage has been assigned as PR-9. The popularity of a web page is reflected in it’s PageRank.

Hopefully, I’ll continue to improve my PageRank and keep on climbing to higher PR.