Personal Branding Tip: Get a Google Profile

Google recently announced that it would start adding profile summaries to the bottom of search result pages when a name is used as a query. This might be your best chance to get a link (with photo) on the first page of Google results — especially if you have a relatively common name.

Fortunately, if you search for my name on Google, my personal site is the first result returned. But it can never hurt to have more ways for people to find you, and setting up a Google Profile is free and easy to do:

1. Go to the Google Profiles site.
2. Sign in with your Google account.
3. Fill out the form. You need to fill in at least some of the fields, otherwise your profile won’t appear on the results pages (Google will warn you if that is that case). Make sure to add a photo and link to your sites.

Your Google Profile can contain as much or as little information as you like (here’s mine, for example), but as Google notes, the more information your profile contains, the higher its rank will be. If you have a common name, adding more information might be a way to get your name to appear in search results more frequently, as Google will only display a maximum of four profiles on each results page.

Personal branding is a hot topic at the moment (much discussed on Twitter, for example). A Google Profile might be an easy way to establish a presence on the first page of Google results, at the cost of just a few minutes of your time. Of course, once everyone sets up a Google Profile its usefulness as a branding tool will be diminished somewhat, but right now it’s a highly recommended step.

Have you set up your Google Profile?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks