SEO yourself

You never know what turns your life will take. But on thing that we do know is that everyone Googles everything, and they are googling you. If you do not have good search engine ranking for your name and its derivatives, you could be in deep santorum.

The 2012 Presidential hopeful candidate, Rick Santorum found an enemy when he issued slurs against homosexuality. It triggered a radical response by a cleaver Adult Journalist who decided to build a website dedicated to smearing the candidate's reputation.


The website is called SpreadingSantorum.com. In a tragic twist of fate for Rick Santorum, that website is more popular than the website dedicated to his presidential run. It ranks first in Google for many keywords related to the candidates name.

As you can see, the author coined a definition for the candidate's name that is far from flattering. Indeed, the distaste is so vulgar that I chose not to publish this on WAVGroup.com, my business website.

In truth, I will admit that I purchased this domain name victorlund.com to protect my personal brand. Until 2012, the page was no more than a landing page. Divine inspiration caused me to begin publishing here (actually I had the flu and was bored). Another truth, one of the first things I did when my wife and I decided on a name for our daughter was purchase the domain name, alexandralund.com. She started blogging there at the age of 8.

So here is the deal. The only way that you can legally protect yourself against malicious web publishing is through copyright. To file a copyright suit, you are looking at a $10,000 filing fee - so that is not really a good option.

The easy way to protect your online reputation is to become a self publisher. Write about yourself, your brand. If you are a company, become an expert on you. The more you publish, the more Google will credit you. Google Victor Lund and you will see what I mean.

Don't forget Social Media sites. I spend quite a bit of time registering my name to social media sites that I do not use, like Bebo. There is a huge list of these site and it is ever expanding. There is a simple way to check using a website called namechk.com.

Anyway - don't be a santorum - start protecting your online reputation.