MARY GABLE

When I was in high school, I dressed up as Where’s Waldo for Halloween. Little did I know it would be, like, a metaphor for how I’d later feel on the Internet. I’m deliberately NOT alt-tagging this with my name though, because this is actually kind of embarrassing.

Sometimes, I’m glad my name is a timeless classic. I’m thankful my parents didn’t brand me with something impossible to pronounce. Or embarrassing to write on a resume (I’m looking at you, Diamond and Princess). But there are times when I envy the Adriannes, Zoeys, and Clementines of the world.

Trying to achieve personal SEO is one of those times.

SEO is tough for anyone. But if you’re a Matthew or a Kate, or, God forbid, you had the misfortune of being born a Jones, fighting your way onto page 1 of Google is a serious uphill battle.

In a way, this feels kind of inevitable.

It starts in kindergarten. You become known as “your name-plus.” You answer to your full name or a nickname while everybody else is on a first-name basis. I had a teacher in elementary school who, unsure how to distinguish between two of my peers and I, settled on “Mary 1,” Mary 2,” and “Mary 3.” (If that doesn’t screw with a budding sense of self, I don’t know what does.)

Then came the screen name era. As anyone with a blah name will tell you, you can forget about scoring a username with any iteration of the words in your name, sans a string of numbers and random underscores. And there’s no chance you’ll get to use the same handle on AIM that you have on Hotmail.

I’m sure this is the only explanation for the idiotic usernames I kept using until way after it was cool.

Now, Mary 2 is expected to stand out in the wide world of Google—a pool just a teeny bit bigger than my third-grade classroom. If you’re like me, chances are somebody’s already snapped up www.yourname.com. (In my case, that domain’s lucky owner is a photographer from Nova Scotia who specializes in weirdly colorized semi-nudes. Go figure.)

If you’re just starting to stake your claim on the Web, there’s not much you can do about others who got there first. But there is hope, sort of.

Here are a few resources I’ve found helpful on personal branding and SEO:

• 3 tips for personal SEO, Marketing Sherpa
• 14-point checklist to Dominate Your Personal Brand on Google, KISSmetrics
• Seven Ways Writers Can Build Online Authority with Google+, Copyblogger

Basically, follow general best practices when it comes to personal SEO. But do it better than your name-clones.

As far as special tips for the plain-named, my teachers may have been right all along: tack on something to make it unique. Add your middle initial, a suffix, or a title to refer to yourself professionally. Grammar Girl is the first one that comes to mind (though I’m not sure why Mignon Fogarty uses it—she hit the unique-name jackpot).

I’m just starting to implement some of these guidelines, like adding my name to site meta titles and images and optimizing my social profiles. Check back with me in a few months. I’ll let you know how it all works out.

Or better yet, just Google me.

[UPDATE: I just wanted to add a link to this article published on Mashable last week. Another way to narrow the results Google returns for your name? Get hitched. “By adding a married name to your maiden name, this will create more search results from Google and keep the original SEO relatively intact. Even if you hyphenate the two last names, search results will go hardly unaffected if the maiden name is still next to your first name.” ]