Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 100: Have a Say in What Google Says About You

Level Medium

Platform Web

Cost Starting at $10 a month

Someone out there’s trying to find information about you right now, whether it’s a potential employer, a date, or a long-lost friend. What happens when she Googles you?

More than half the time, she’ll get information about someone else with the same name or a website that you don’t control. This hack provides the ins and outs of setting up a nameplate website that makes you “Googleable” with a web page whose content you control.

But I Already Have a Website

You may already have a personal blog with photos of your kids on it or a page dedicated to your monstrous LEGO collection that comes up when your name is searched. But is that the first point of contact you want a Google cold-caller to have? Consider your nameplate site your Internet business card, where you publish contact and professional info in a context-insensitive way that can help Googlers get a bird’s-eye view of who you are and what you do — beyond the LEGO collection.

Get Your Domain

Do what you can to register a yourname.com (or .org) domain. This costs a small yearly fee, starting around $10, depending on the top-level domain you choose (.com, .net, .org, .tv, and so on). There was a time you may have thought one domain to one individual person was egotistical and unnecessary, but that time is over. You will change jobs, move, go freelance, and switch email addresses more in your lifetime than any other past ...