Along with networking, your resume is perhaps the most important tool you have to excel within your professional field. Many people just view a resume as a summary of personal, educational and professional qualifications, however, nowadays your resume is much more detailed than you may imagine. In the vast world of the Internet, complete with search engines and spiders crawling the web indexing an ever expanding amount of information, you and others are leaving footprints about you resulting in the creation of your search engine resume.

Your search resume is the search engine results pages that appear when someone does a search for your name or does a search for related personal information. The idea of a search engine resume is nothing new; in fact, this has been discussed fairly frequently. See:

“My Google Resume” over on the FactorCity blog
“This Will Go Down On Your Permanent Record” by Quadszilla of SEOBlackhat fame
“The Blog is the New Resume” by Adam Dorowski
“Privacy and SEO” by Scott Reynolds of Agency.com via bl.asphemo.us

and finally, Ozgur Alaz of Marketallica who takes this idea to another level by creating “The First Resume in Google Earth”

Each of these articles provides for interesting conversation pieces, but none of these posts really discuss how you can take control your search resume. I wanted to see how much effort it would take to “rewrite” my search resume!

To get an idea of exactly why it is important to take control of your search resume, you should understand the various types of information that might be indexed about you. There are generally three types of footprints that will appear in the search results that can be tracked to your name.

The first are footprints that you have created. For example, you write your name on your MySpace page or your personal blog and now these pages are indexed within the search engine results.

The second set of footprints are those 3rd party groups or associations that you are associated with that publish articles or news stories about you. If you do a search for my name, Andrew Zarick, you will see that I played college soccer and you can get detailed statistics about the games I’ve played in. This information was not created by me, but rather created by the athletic departments of the schools I’ve played against or the newspapers that reported on our games. In this case, this information isn’t exactly a problem, however, if I was previously involved in an athletic scandal or an in-game brawl, it might have become a problem and raised a flag with a future employer or business partner.

The third set of footprints that you should worry about being indexed is related personal information, whether it be phone numbers, email addresses, or nicknames you use when subscribing to forums or websites. If you are a member of AdultFriendFinder.com, you can see how this might be a problem!

So the question becomes, how do you take control your search engine resume? Last week I began a link building experiment concentrating solely on my name. My goal was to see if I could make every result on the first page of Google for “Andrew Zarick” not only be completely relevant to my name, but also link to the information I want people to find. I created a network of sites with my name both in the domain and in the pages’ content. The Andrew Zarick network is made up of the following sites:

andrewzarick.dreamix.tv (My personal/professional blog)
andrewzarick.blogspot.com
andrewzarick.tumblr.com
andrewzarick.wordpress.com
squidoo.com/andrewzarick
Andrew Zarick on LinkedIn

My personal blog had been ranking consistently well, often the #1 result, even before I began this experiment so I wasn’t that concerned about providing it with link juice. Both Squidoo and Blogspot often rank instantly (within a week) for keywords in the domain, especially if you have a fairly original name. If your last name is Mortgage, you might not see instant results. I also noticed that my LinkedIn page was ranking on the 3rd results page of Google prior to this experiment, but with the added link juice provided from the other sites within my network I was able to boost it to the first page this week.

So far my experiment has been pretty successful. Knocking off the edu link to my name will be relatively difficult and will take time since edu’s carry a significant amount of trust within the search engines, but since I’m a recent graduate and no longer on the soccer team, the content won’t be there within 6 months because I will no longer appear on the team roster and the page will likely drop out of the search results. Each of the results above the fold on Google link to my professional blog, which is the content I want people to find if they search for my name. The two results for “Dr. Andrew Zarick Jr.”, which is not me, will also take time to knock off the front page since these sites are well established. By continuing to expand my network and interlinking the sites and writing original content around my name, I should be able to outrank these websites in time. Remember, this experiment has only been underway for 7 days!

I understand that there are factors that might prohibit you from controlling your search engine resume to the same extent that I outline above, the whole first page of Google, especially if you share a name with a celebrity or if your name is John Smith. But if someone is looking for you and your name happens to be Bill Gates, but you don’t have billions in the bank, then think about what long tail searches people might use to find you. If someone is looking for you and you have a common name and they really want to find you, they might search “Bill Gates Brooklyn NY” or do a search for your name with an email address. With this in mind, if you have a common name you should include other such keywords on the content of the pages within the network of sites you create, along with a link to the information you want the person to have about you, whether its a blog or your real online resume.

Depending on your professional field, controlling your search engine resume may or may not be important. If you are a search engine marketer, you better step up your search engine resume game right now. If you are a car salesman, I’d think it would be important that you make an effort to control your search engine resume as well; it might result in a few unexpected sales!