How to win friends and influence Google

What are people seeing when they Google you? That photo of you in a leather vest with your old Metallica cover band? A profanity-laced blog post written by a disgruntled former customer? Or, almost as bad - nothing at all?

If you're a small business owner or an independent contractor, your online reputation isn't something you want to just leave to chance. Not to make you paranoid, but people are almost certainly talking about you on the internet. Sometimes comments are posted on obscure sites that only a few hundred people will ever see. Other times they can turn up in web searches and have a substantial impact on your reputation.

Nowadays you can take it as a given that people will Google you before they decide to hire you. Luckily, you have some power to determine the search results that potential customers will see.

Keep your ear to the internet

Whenever people are talking about you, good or bad, you need a heads-up so that you can respond right away. Google has a free service, little-known outside of geek circles, called Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts), which constantly prowls the web for keywords you select - such as your own name - and emails you whenever the keywords turn up.

Another free monitoring tool called StepRep (steprep.myfrontsteps.com) works much the same way, but also provides a web-based console so you can keep track of search results by sorting them into categories.

Bury the bad stuff

Unless it's actually illegal, it's practically impossible to get a damaging reference to you removed from the internet. The trick is to bury the bad stuff where nobody will ever see it. Few web searchers ever bother to look past the first page of results, so if you can control what's on that first page, you're in good shape.

Of course, you can't "control" what Google chooses to display. But you can be aware of how search engines work, and use that knowledge to your advantage.

Multiply the good stuff

Search engines give preference to pages on popular sites. So sign up to popular business directories and social networking sites that allow you to create a profile page for free. Since these profile pages will prominently display your name, they'll turn up near the top when people search for you.

Start with Facebook.com, the fifth most visited site on the internet. Odds are good that you're already one of the 175 million people with a personal Facebook page, but you might not be aware that Facebook also allows you to create a page for your business. Other sites to consider are LinkedIn.com and Naymz.com (networking sites for businesspeople), Squidoo.com (where users share expertise), and Digg.com (where users share and vote on cool links).

Of course, you don't want your online presence to be limited to a bunch of blah profile pages. If you can create original content that's interesting and relevant to people searching for you, you'll make yourself stand out - and other people might even link to your content, helping to send potential customers your way.

Blogging and tweeting

If you have the slightest gift for gab, consider blogging. A blog is just an online journal that you update regularly. But since a blog can also contain static pages showing, for instance, your contact information, many businesses use it as a substitute for a traditional website.

Using either of the two most popular free blogging platforms, Blogger.com or WordPress.com, you can have a swank-looking blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Don't be put off by scary acronyms like RSS, CSS, and HTML. All that stuff will be handled for you. If the sign-up process is a little intimidating, get a twelve-year-old to talk you through it.

If your attention span is a little too short for blogging, maybe Twitter.com is more your speed. Twitter, which has recently broken out of the geek ghetto into mainstream popularity, is a "micro-blogging" platform where updates ("tweets") are limited to just 140 characters at a time.

Now that you're blogging or tweeting, you'll have to think of something to say. Don't stress about it too much. Write about what you know - your business. Don't strain for genius. Just be yourself. If you're lacking for inspiration, comment on other articles, videos, or pictures that you've found online.

Google loves video

If you've got the time and the equipment to make videos, you can post them to a video-sharing site like YouTube.com (the most popular) or Vimeo.com (less popular, but better quality).

You can just post a series of ads, but you'll get more views if you share knowledge that your customers might find useful. If you have expertise in some carpentry or construction technique, make a how-to video. Keep it short and sweet. Don't worry too much about production values. Some of the most popular videos feature ordinary people talking into their webcams.

Bringing it all together

Okay, so now you've got a blog, some videos, and a bunch of profile pages, all prominently displaying your name. Here's the very simple but vital trick that turns this from a checklist into a strategy:

Link between all these pages.

Whenever you post a video, link to it from your blog. Tweet about new blog posts. Link to your blog from your Facebook profile, and vice versa. If there's an outside page that talks about your company in a positive way - a local news report, somebody else's blog - link to it.

Google distinguished itself from earlier, less efficient search engines by looking at the links between pages, as well as the content on those pages, to determine page ranking. Nowadays most search engines use variations of this technique. It doesn't matter how well-written or informative your website is. If there are no incoming links, Google assumes that it's not very important.

The free monitoring tool StepRep, mentioned above, has another trick to help maximize these links and improve your Google presence. When you find positive stories, StepRep lets you add them to a "widget" - a simple piece of code that can be pasted to multiple locations, like your blog or website. The widgets link to the stories that you've chosen to promote, helping to push those pages higher in search results.

Conquering the curve

The main thing to remember is that the millions of people visiting Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter every day aren't there to dutifully plug their businesses - they're there to express themselves, connect with other people, and have fun. Once you're past the learning curve - which isn't as steep as you imagine - you'll figure out an online strategy that works for you. And executing it will be a lot more enjoyable than buying your yearly ad in the yellow pages.