People will Google you
These days when someone meets you, they are more than likely to look you up on the internet. Depending on how they met you they will go about looking you up in a few different ways.
They might search you out on Facebook, and if you have a picture of yourself as your profile image they are more likely to make the connection. They will be able to see anything that you have made publically available.
They might choose to look you up on LinkedIn. Again having your face as your profile image will help them find you. They will have access to everything that you have updated.
Twitter is also a place to search for you. Your image is the only way to truly tell if they have the right person at first glance. If you have a public profile they will be able to see everything that you have posted.
Last but not least they may Google you. When they look you up on Google they will have an overall image of who you are and where to find you.
What will they find?
Google has the ability to crawl through most of the internet and bring all those pieces together. Wherever you have used your name (other than Facebook) will show up here in your search. Facebook has blocked Google from crawling through the content and that is why you have to go directly to Facebook to search for someone there. Here is what mine looks like to me. What might be interesting to know is that when you Google me, you might get different results than I did :)
Google yourself
I want you to Google yourself to see what comes up for you. This will give you a good indication of what people will find when they look for you. You might notice that in the images section of my search there is a picture of someone who isn’t me. Her name is Angela Mondor, and it was awesome to find her but I didn’t want people to find her when they were looking for me. luckily for me, she doesn’t create a lot of content on the internet so it was easy for me to push her results further down the search engine.
What if you don’t like what you see?
Just as I wanted to push the other Angela Mondor further down the search engines, if there is content out there that is associated with you that you don’t like the best way to push it down the search engine rankings is to create more of your own content.
What to change first?
Having a website that you have 100% control over is very helpful as long as your name is associated with it. I always suggest that you have a self-hosted WordPress website. That is the best kind of website to have as Google loves to crawl it and you can see that in my search it was the first to come up. Google+ is a no-brainer when trying to get your name out there… They are always going to rank their own content higher. It might surprise you that LinkedIn is right up there as a place for you to shine, but more often than not people will find you on LinkedIn when they Google you (that is if you are on LinkedIn) Twitter is also well crawled by Google and can be a great way to showcase yourself.
As for the images, you can see where those images are coming from by hovering your mouse over them. Once you know where they are coming from you will be able to change them by going to the websites where they are coming from.
Maintenance
I suggest going through your search results on a regular basis. If you are trying to clean the results up, I would suggest checking it every few days until you see the changes that you made all over the place. If you are happy with your results you can leave it for a while, however, if you have someone else with your same name who is also fighting to be found on Google you might need to check it more often.
