Ellie's Blog

Do You Own the Search Results for Your Name?

I won't even attempt to deny I'm not a marketing geek. One of the things I loved about Kyle James' blog post "Jokes: 36 Reasons You Might be Addicted to Social Media" was "#6: You own the Google search results for your name." That definitely held true for me.

Here are all the top results for my name - x right in a row.

1. My blog
2. My blog "about me" page
3. Twitter
4. Facebook
5. FriendFeed
6. MITX
7. LinkedIn
8. Twitterholic
9. SEMPO Meetup
10. AMA Boston
11. Amazon.com
12. RSSmeme
13. one of my recent tweets
14. BoardReader
15. one of my flickr photos
16. my comment on a blog post
17. Digg
18. FriendFeed (again!)
19. Tweetree
20. another flickr photo
21. Twitter mobile
22. a mention on another blog
23. BackType
24. Insightory presentation I did on Twitter
25. HubSpot blog article I posted
26. my comment on a blog post
27. a reposting of one of my articles from the HubSpot blog
28. my comment on a blog post
29. SlideShare presentation I did on Inbound Marketing
30. my comment on a blog post
31. my listing as a speaker for Geek Girl Camp

OK, I'll stop there. The results actually go on and on - and rightfully all about me. I actually made it 12 results pages deep before giving up on finding that first non-me-related result! Of course, I understand that there aren't a lot of Ellie Mirmans out there (if any!), and that even my first or my last name separately are not very common. But, damn, that was a lot of content!

Some things I realized:

• It's easy to create a lot of bits of content. I don't consider myself to be such a prolific writer / content producer (at least for the public web). Most of the results were either profiles on different social media sites, blog comments, presentations I had posted on sharing sites, or blog posts themselves.
• I've got a lot of social media profiles. Set up, not necessarily in use. Funny enough, they're almost ranked in the order in which I use them the most. First Twitter, then Facebook, then LinkedIn... In any case, social media profiles rank very well because of the reputation and optimization of the sites, and this actually serves as a good way for helping people connect with you online even via a Google search.
• What do your search results say about you? At first I was going to say, no one searches for your name (most likely) anyway, so who cares. But really, there may be a few who do, and they are probably either (1) trying to find/connect with you or (2) trying to learn more about you. Getting found in these top search results ensures that you're enabling connections. And producing more content ensures that you have good results (instead of potentially damaging results) at the top. What do my search results say about me? Well, that I work at HubSpot, and I'm pretty active in social media.

Of course, for those folks out there with less content or more competition for their name on the web, the Google profile gives everyone a good opportunity to get prime real estate on the first page of search results for their name.

Photo by silvery

I Made An Internet Marketing Geek Discovery!

It's no secret that I'm an Internet marketing geek. In particular, I spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of Facebook to share how businesses can use the social network for marketing.

Well, in doing just that, I made a discovery! Yesterday I discovered a loophole that allowed me to create links from Facebook to my website that pass SEO (search engine optimization) credit.

This is a pretty big deal because (1) a link from Facebook.com is incredibly valuable, and (2) almost all links from Facebook are either "no follow" (don't pass SEO juice) or "redirects" (first bring you to a page that warns that you're leaving Facebook). But through the custom-coded FBML (Facebook Markup Language) application, I could code whatever link I wanted - the target URL, the link text, everything!

For at least an hour, I was jumping in my office seat. Of course, after sharing my news with the marketing team, I was volunteered to write a blog article about it.

Read my post: Facebook Gives SEO Credit to Links in FBML Applications

Photo credit: futurowoman

Show the Link Love This Valentine's Day

I can't get enough of these videos (especially the bloopers). Danger: contains much geekiness.

Link Love - A Geek Valentine's Day Ballad

(a HubSpot original by our very own Repcor)

Link Love - Bloopers

You might just see my awesome directing skills showcased...

Doesn't make any sense? Check out the lyrics or why link love is better than flowers or chocolate. Oh, and send some link love.

Excessive Use of My Blog: Does it make me more popular on the web?

So I believe I am reaching a crazy level of number of blog posts in one day. Well, number of significant blog posts that is - I used to post many short, pointless ones all the time. So I believe I am reaching a new level of craziness / devotion to my new blog.

And that actually made me think... if I have so much fresh content, would I actually be getting some more love from the Internet in terms of my blog's popularity? I ran a report on this blog using Website Grader, a free search engine optimization measurement tool that measures this kind of thing.*

I checked a couple of things:
- my old blog: score of 24! I was shocked. I've had that thing for years and posted to it pretty regularly. There must have been something messed up somewhere because the report didn't register any Google indexed pages (how many pages Google sees within my site). Also I had pretty much no inbound links and my Google PageRank was 0 (on a scale of 0-10, 10 being the best).
- my friend Rachel's blog: got a whopping 67 if I remember correctly. Now that's a decent grade. She had more pages indexed by Google and also had quite a few inbound links (the primary measure used by Google to see how important your site is on the web). I felt ashamed.
- this blog: 30 - how funny that just after 2 days and a couple blog posts that I'm already doing better than my old blog. Very funny. My Alexa traffic rating was quite good (13) but I need to investigate how that's actually calculated, because I know that I'm not the 13th most trafficed site on the web absolutely. No inbound links or indexed pages... I need to check if blogspot sets up separate pages for each of my blog posts - because that is key.

Alright, I'm cutting myself off now. Definitely past my bedtime.

*If you're interested in seeing a sample report from WebsiteGrader.com, you can check out the report on my site here.