You can also pay someone to geekify your website. A college student or tinkering neighbor might have the skills, and just a couple hours of work might make your site look and feel more professional. Plus, technical tricks like page titles, headings, and verbal tags can heavily influence search-engine results and help hide material you don't want people to see: Driving your website higher up in the results can push less flattering information down below the first page or two that most people look at.
Create links. To help people find all the info you want them to find, use hyperlinks to guide users from your corporate bio to your LinkedIn profile to your blog, and vice versa—creating your own self-referring network. Also ask friends and colleagues, where appropriate, to create links to your stuff from their own Web pages and other online features. The more traffic your own material gets, and the more external links there are to it, the higher it will show up in search engines.
Become an expert. Start your own blog or contribute to others. Be insightful and thought provoking (without burning bridges), and search engines will start turning up results that reflect your expertise. Ask others to hyperlink to your blog—and reciprocate.
If blogging is too time-consuming, comment on other blogs, bulletin boards, and social news sites like digg.com. Use your real name, be smart, and keep within the bounds of good taste. Wherever possible, include links back to your website or something else of yours.
Push the bad stuff out of sight. That photo of you setting the grill on fire last July 4 might be a family gem, but you don't need colleagues coming across it on your Aunt Nancy's blog. Ask friends and family to hide personal information behind good privacy settings, or to delete it altogether. It might be funny to family, but your boss—or future boss—doesn't need to be in on the joke.
