Ten years ago a very small set of public figures had to care about their “public persona”.

Increasingly, everyone (or at least everyone with professional aspirations in the white-collar world) needs to start paying attention to the “face” they are presenting online.

Over the last year there have been plenty of articles about people who have botched their online persona. It doesn’t take many photos of your weekend exploits to turn off a potential employer, investor, or partner.

Doubtless these articles have prompted many people to take a slash-and-burn approach to their online persona. Making their MySpace pages private, disassociating themselves from online galleries, shutting down personal domains– I’m sure there are plenty of tactics to trim your presence.

But it looks like you can venture too far in the direction of online anonymity (tip o’ the hat to the great article over at Web Worker Daily). Some highlights of the article include:

  • It turns out that a staggering 77% of recruiters do online searches on candidates.
  • 25% hiring managers do online searches on candidates.
  • 1 in 10 hiring managers so social networking searches on candidates

It looks like hiring managers lag a bit behind recruiters in terms of net-savvy, but this number isn’t going anywhere but up.

The article offers some good advice on how to control your online brand, mostly centered around scrutinizing and pruning the data about yourself that you make available. The article doesn’t give a ton of detail on how to actually CONTROL what pages return for your name in Google.

Here are a few tips for people who have–or are willing to have– a personal website (I’ll add some tips for people who DON’T want to get into such web geekery next!):

  • Get a domain name. FirstnameLastname.com is ideal, but if you can’t get that, make damn sure that your first name and last name are somewhere in the domain name.
  • Make sure your first name and last name are in the title tag of your home page. If your name is common, you might ponder adding your city, job title, or key skill(s) to the title tag. A search for John Smith might return a useless amount of data for a searcher to sift through, so they might pivot for a search like “John Smith Seattle” or “John Smith programmer”.
  • Header tags. Your first name and last name should be in an h1 tag on your home page. The same advice about other search phrases applies.
  • Links links links. This is the most important aspect of controlling search results… It isn’t easy and there is no shortcut. It’s more a lifestyle than a task. You need to have links to your web site and the link text needs to be EXACTLY your name. So, if I were linking to my own site, a link that says “Check out this guy” would be bad. A like that says “Tony Wright” would be good. The best example of the power of links is the phenomonon of “Google Bombing“. Google has altered their search algorithms to sidestep abuse like this, but links (and link text) is still hugely important.

    How could I possible get people to add the text “Tony Wright” to their web pages and link them to my site? It’s actually pretty easy. You most certainly have friends who have some web presence. All they need to do is find some corner of their web site to add it to. Do you participate in any web communities? Forums? Do you comment on blogs? Ever post on Google Groups? All of these places have ways where you can link back to your site (note: blogs are becoming less of an option here due to the nofollow attribute).

So what about the (vast majority of) people who really don’t want to own or maintain a web page? It’s real easy to forget that most people don’t enjoy writing/blogging, don’t have web geek skills, or don’t have time to invest in such activities. That’s fine– you can still control your results.

There are hundreds of sites out there that allow you to create online profiles. Many of them are decidedly unprofessional (MySpace, etc), but many of them cater to professionals. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose, though you should aim for the mainstream where you can and pay attention to how the site’s profiles adhere to the SEO rules discussed above. For name SEO, Jobster reigns supreme out of the box.

So here are your SEO steps for people who want to control their brand by creating a profile.

  • Select a place to build a profile. Jobster and LinkedIn are your two best bets. I have a personal bias for Jobster (it’s where I work!). Whatever your opinion, Jobster has a leg up on the SEO front, which will make step #3 possible.
  • Build out a kickass profile. Be honest but craft your message carefully.
  • Links links links. Just like #3 in the previous list, find ways to link the your name to your profile. This is certainly the hardest step, but it’s the most important.