Fast Track Guide To a Solid Internet Presence

A presence on the internet begins with a name, be it your real name, screen name or business name.

This is not a “shove all your info out there recklessly” guide. The two main reasons for doing this is to establish a presence quickly, and to make it stupidly easy for someone to find you or your business from a first-page-result Google search.

If you’re lucky enough to have acquired the dot-com for your name, that’s not good enough anymore because Google now uses server speed as a factor in search results.

It’s most likely true that uses a super-fast web host for your domain is cost prohibitive. The way to work around this is to use social web services that do have super-fast servers and link them back to your domain. Google these days ((hearts)) social media, so where your web host speed fails, social media picks up the slack.

It is important that for whatever name you use that it always be the same for any service you sign up for. This will make your web presence that much more solid.

Contrary to popular belief, it is OK to use a name with numbers in it, because social profiles can contain alternative nicknames in them anyway.

How to choose the right name

This is easy. Choose a name that:

• Contains no spaces
• Contains no dashes
• Contains no periods
• Is available for every social profile you sign up for

For example, if you choose JaneDoe82, check the name availability for each social service BEFORE signing up. If for any social service the name is taken, ditch it and use something else. Yes, this is a bit of a pain in the neck to do, but worth it to establish a presence.

It’s also suggested you use a password manager of some kind, because you’ll be signing up for a lot of accounts.

Aside from your web site, these are the social services that matter concerning a web presence:

• Google profile
• YouTube (whether you use it or not)
• LinkedIn
• eBay profile (whether you use it or not)
• Facebook account and/or “fan” page
• MySpace profile
• Twitter account

Optional:

• Windows Live account with public profile (accessible at profiles.live.com)
• Yahoo! account with public profile (accessible at profiles.yahoo.com)

For each account you sign up for and set up, have them all use the same name, screen name or business name you want. Modify each so that there is a link going back to your web site or blog.

What does doing all of the above accomplish?

It makes you easily found very quickly. Google will crawl all the information from all the profiles you set up, “see” the link back to your web site which establishes your presence is hardly any time at all.

Even if your web site does not show up first in a Google search result, the other social stuff will. Being that you posted your web site link in your social profile stuff, people will see that and know where to go to find you.

Highly recommended additional tips

• USE A PASSWORD MANAGER. Sorry to put that in all capital letters but using one is mandatory. I suggest KeePass. Free and good. Do not use the same password for every service you use.
• Closely examine privacy settings for each service you sign up for. This is simply a smart thing to do. While it’s true you’ll be careful about what you share out as far as your information is concerned, some social services (namely Facebook) seem to change their privacy policies every other week, so be on the lookout for changes like that.
• Promote your presence. Having the social stuff alone will be great for promotion, but once finished signing up for all your stuff, send an e-mail to your friends/colleagues containing your social profile links. It’s a good bet that many use the same stuff you’ll be using, and you’ll easily be able to stay better in touch.
• Center everything around one e-mail address. You can use your primary e-mail address, or one that forwards to your primary e-mail address. You do this for account management and update purposes. If you have a bunch of e-mail addresses all over the place, managing all your stuff will turn into a nightmare in short order.
• Learn how to use e-mail filters. Create folders and filter specific message types to them for even better management. For example, all YouTube service updates come from the e-mail address service@youtube.com. Set up a filter to dump everything that comes from YouTube to a folder called “YouTube”.

How fast does this work?

You can get indexed and found for the name you choose in less than 24 hours on Google when you use social media.

Google is not the same web site you remember concerning its indexing practices. When it comes to social media, Google loves that stuff and indexes it almost in real time in some instances. I have even seen updates happen on Google concerning specific search results in less than ten minutes.

This is the modern way to get found on the internet. The biggest pain in the neck is signing up for all your social stuff, but once done, the presence you want to achieve will be established very quickly.

After all is said and done, whenever anyone asks how to find you on the internet, just say “Google me at [your screen name]“, and it will work like a charm.