Rumpelstistkin, Pen Names, and Search Engine Optimization

The creature Rumpelstiltskin guards his name. His name like many names in supernatural stories is a source of power. For instance it is ill-advised to utter the name of a demon. To say “Bael” is to summon the head of the infernal powers. I have discovered the hard way that the same works online. If you are going to write a negative review of a book on your blog, for instance, you will more likely than not receive an email from the author either trying to win you over or trying to defeat you.

Writers are inveterate Googlebators. I’m such a virulant Googlebator, myself, that I’ve set up Google alerts that constantly run. They will send me a notice as soon as my name appears in a new context on the Web. When someone writes something negative, positive, or otherwise about “Matt Briggs +writer” I am notified immediately and can choose like Beal if I will make my presence known.

Writers have often deliberated over their names. They might take up pen names to protect their identity or names to conceal their gender. Lewis Carroll is really Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. George Eliot is really Mary Ann Evans. It is less common I think these days to do this. I imagine that sometime soon writers will consider the unique string (the sequence of characters) to create a unique online handle. A Google alert for the writer Fred Smith would be useless among the hundreds of Smith’s busy posting blog entries and photos to Flickr. A writer named, Dog11&Tree, would at least have the knowledge that she is the only one with that name on the Web.

And conversely if you were a fan of Dog11&Tree, when you wanted to consult Google to find out more about Dog11&Tree your search would uncover information directly related to her. If you were a fan of Fred Smith author of Down For Whatever, you would have a much harder time sorting through entries for Fred Smith the founder of FedEx.

Fred Smith’s problem of getting lost among more prominent Fred Smith’s is an increasingly common one for authors. Fred Smith the author of Down For Whatever for whatever appears on the first page of Google returns, albeit in the last position, in 10th place. The award winning anthropologist and author Fred Smith, author of The Origin of Modern Humans, doesn’t appear until page 5 in Google, in 50th place. More than half of all readers click on the first entry.

Less than three percent of users select the last item (rank 10) on the page. At first it seems that there is nothing you could do — Google has built its empire on having the most accurate returns for any term you enter into a search engine. Likely most people entering Fred Smith into a search engine are actually looking for information about the founder of Fed Ex. Google’s pagerank algorithm looks at a number of factors in determining that a Web page is relevant to the term entered into the search box. The page determined the most relevant appears in the first position for returns and then so on until the pages Google has indexed are exhausted. There are 62 pages of returns for “Fred Smith” and yet nearly 60 percent of Web searchers are going to click the very first return.

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is a discipline has grown around strategies to get Web sites to rank higher in search engines. A cut and paste from Wikipedia defines SEO as the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. While is beyond the scope of this post, there are some modest steps an author can take to make sure they are at least visible in search engines.

To make sure you are visible, you will need the following tools:

1. Blog
   A blog, unlike a static Web page, is generated by software that is continually updated to reflect changes in search engine rank algorithms and to incorporate the latest changes to features in the social Web. Far from being a buzzword, the social Web (or Web 2.0) incorporates some concepts and technologies that differentiate the Web of YouTube and FaceBook from the Web built on HTML 2.0. Frequently updated content pushes into the Web where it can be shared via social bookmarks such as DIG or StumbleUpon. I would recommend using WordPress which produces sites that are favored by the Google.
2. Links
   Links related to your must that point back to your blog. Your blog performs the function of trying together all of the things going on the Web in relation to your name as an author. The number of links to your blog tell Google the authority of your blog in relation to your name as an author. The authority helps determine the relevancy of the page. It is then worth your time to update your name on various social media sites which reflect your role as an author so that you can link back to your page. Link to your site from the Directory of Poets and Writers, GoodReads, and so on.
3. SEO
   Optimize key content in relation to your name. Google is constantly juggling how it ranks pages but find a current content optimization guideline to make sure your page will be ranked. Google uses a piece of software to analyze the web called GoogleBot. This bot visits your page and analyzes the text on the page. The guidelines for structuring the text on the page will reflect the current “best guesses” about how Google works.
4. Metrics
   Use Google Web Master tools at: www.google.com/webmasters/tools.
5. Monitor (Googlebat)
   Finally, monitor your returns on Google to keep abreast of changes in your position. The Web is not static and instead constantly changing. One day another writer with your name could start publishing and easily knock you out of your Google ranking.

For more information see “10 SEO Techniques All Top Web Sites Should Use.”

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