A week ago I realized that no searches for Connie Benson are hitting my blog. I see that there are 3-4 searches each day for my name. And tonite I see that just Connie is catching Google’s attention too.
Last week when I pondered this problem on Twitter I had to back up & explain what I was talking about. So here goes:
My husband’s family went with the Danish spelling for Bensen rather than the Scandinavian spelling of Benson. My maiden name was four letters & the name of a farm in Norway. My forefathers knew better than to keep the name of Johnson which is what it was when they came to this land.
As a result of the Danish spelling, many people misspell our last name. It doesn’t bother me & if people link to my blog it really doesn’t matter. In thinking about branding I had to consider all the ways to make it easy to find me. And I realized that maybe people would try the URL www.conniebenson.com so I bought it. I had my sister do a redirect and I thought that all was fine.
But last weekend I realized that Googling for Connie Benson brought up nothing. So I asked on Twitter. By the power of Twitter, four friends responded immediately. Each had their own ideas. One idea was to put in a place holder post like this. So I’m doing that. Another friend wrote a script for WordPress. And another had more advice. Aren’t online friends just THE best?!!
Do any of you SEO gurus have any additional ideas?
I am not an SEO maven, *but* something I did that was hugely effective was to write a narrative using all the words I wanted to be associated with, then hid it in an invisible div RIGHT at the top of the BODY content. The next round of spidering ranked me up 6.
Hey Clay, I think that might constitute “cloaking”, a practice that Google penalizes and might result in the suspect website being blacklisted permanently.
Connie, I understand what you mean. I’m Asian and in my part of the world, my family name would be “Ng”. However for my online presence, I decided to use the romanized version “Huang”. Besides being more pronounceable, I believe that “Huang” would be easier for Google to find as compared to “Ng” (I suspect this could be due to the lack of vowels but then I might be wrong).
Was there a difference in your case if you try searching your name via Google and Google Blogsearch?
Thanks Clay for the suggestion. There are so many things to learn! It’s incredible.
In searching this morning, I just realized this morning that I don’t have a google alert set up for ‘Connie Benson’. So even I’ve overlooked it. It’s an interesting topic. In searching Google Blogsearch, I found references to ‘Connie Benson’ in blogs from Sept. that I didn’t know were out there. How interesting…
And Stan, I can see your challenge. That would certainly cause challenges too. So as people choose the name they’re going to brand themselves as – they need to take a lot of things into consideration! Thanks for pointing that out in terms of your part of the world!
It will be interesting to see if this post makes any difference. Will keep you posted.
Hey Connie, I went and googled my name on Google Search, and my blog site shows up as #6. However when I google myself on Google Blogsearch, I don’t appear anywhere. Not in the first ten pages anyway. But my webstats show that I’ve been getting some referrals from Blogsearch via a few of my blog topics. How strange.
Connie, I feel your pain. I, too, married a man of Danish descent. (Another funny thing – my MIL is Norwegian, and I’m Swedish on my father’s side. Uff da!) My last name is misspelled all the time. While it doesn’t bother me when Pizza Hut does it, it’s a bit more frustrating when trying to establish (and police) your online presence. I have Google alerts set up for the correct spelling, and the most common misspelling. When I find it misspelled (and supposedly referring to me), I either contact the siteowner to correct, or post a comment to the blog with the correct spelling, so both spellings are on the same page. Not exactly high-tech, but it seems to work.
I have hesitated to reserve the misspelled name in a domain, in fear that I would deny that option to the person who really does have that name. Perhaps too kind-hearted, in this dog-eat-dog-SEO world, but that’s what’s kept me from doing it. I don’t think not doing so has denied me any growth in business, at this point.
Feeling your Danish pain,
Angie
Hi Angie,
Thanks for sharing the marital Danish pain. Heidi suggested I change my name, but I don’t think so.
Heidi solved the problem & I need to blog about it (before she tells the world).
The dilemma is alleviated. This post probably helped too!
And people can spell my name either way! I’m used to it… :)
Connie
Two suggestions:
I suggest tagging posts with both connie benson and connie bensen. This allows Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, and WordPress to get you high in Google ranks (often these tend to show up around 3rd from my experience). I assume if you edit just a a half dozen your posts in 5 minutes, that your issue would be corrected relatively soon (especially if you do it on future posts).
Second, make a squidoo with the mispelling and just have some sort of re-direct via squidoo. Squidoos tend to show up pretty high in the rankings. The disadvantage of squidoo is the distractions that squidoo websites have. A better solution, might be a twitter profile or extra blog catalog or mybloglog with the mispelling which should do the functionally the same thing (especially if you followed 20 or so people). Either of the above solutions should take about 5-7 minutes.
Hope it all works out!
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