Ben Roy

Years ago I was very concerned about what people would find when they typed "Ben Roy" into a search engine. It might not be what you think though: I was worried that they'd find me. My primary concern was privacy, and I was quite happy to discover that my name is way too plain for anything about me specifically to make it's way to the top.

Now fast forward a few years. As a part of my overall marketing efforts, I've been thinking a lot about 'branding' myself. Part of that is of course making sure that people can find me when they go looking. What was once the best thing about my name is instead a major challenge to overcome.

I just recently registered this domain and started posting to it, and to be honest I haven't made any major effort to get it ranking. I definitely didn't want to get it sandboxed, so I figured I'd starting posting to be blog, add a couple of links in, and then after a month or two I'd work on building backlinks.

There's not a lot of serious competition to get to the first page. There are a few Facebook pages, a couple of other social networking sites, etc. There is ONE major stumbling block though. Apparently there is a guy out there named Ben Roy Mottleson. He is some kind of minor celebrity (maybe just online?) related to a science show or something like that. There are all kinds of articles and sites about him, including Wikipedia. If I can make it past those, I'll be in the clear.

One minor thing I've noticed when building a site that mentions the author in every post. Configuring the author name to be an important keyword has a nearly-miraculous auto-optimizing effect. Your keyword (aka author name) ends up sprinkled throughout your entire site, in every view, and in every place that your content is distributed. My user name is currently "Ben" on this site but I think I'll end up changing it to "Ben Roy" to help out with the ranking.