I’m a nobody in the world of programming. Literally. I’ve published next to nothing, I’ve done very little in the way of public projects, and I’ve never done any of the cool stuff that even a guy like Portman Wills or Jin Yang has. Heck, I’m a nobody.
Yet I’m still on the front page of Google when you search my name.
More importantly, I’m on the front page when potential employers search my name. Even better, my blog is the seventh link. Not bad for something with 2 readers (Hi mom!).
How did this happen?
I attribute it to Stack Overflow. Two years ago, if you had done a search for my name, you would have come up with the yellow-belly from Star Trek: The Original Series. Not cool.
You’d have also come up with some guy that got blocked on Twitter. But me? I was on the second page… Where no one has gone before.
Anyway, back to how Stack Overflow rocked my Name to the top of Google.
It has amazingly good SEO practices. Not the shady, back-alley kind, but the Google-Optimized sitemap, the friendly URLs, and its sheer size.
It wasn’t all Stack Overflow though. I also had to give up my fear. Fear of seeing my name out there on the internet, fear of decloaking and showing the world I’m more than just a screen name (Gortok, in case you were wondering), and fear that I’d screw something up in some untold way. You know, like when you take the last bagel at a conference and everyone gives you the stink-eye.
The biggest part is that I had to build my online brand, and Stack Overflow gave me the tools to do that. That’s worth double the time I’ve spent there.
Extra: From the I-buy-a-volvo-and-I-always-see-a-volvo-on-the-road-department:
- Inc. magazine online has an article on this subject: Claiming your name on the Web.