Personal branding on the web is important. If you want to know something about a business contact, the first place you go is Google. Managing my own online reputation and using social media to advance my SEO has become something of a mission. In the last couple of months, my work profile, my LinkedIn profile and my Twitter profile have slowly started to climb Google's rankings, but the idea for this post came to me after reading a great post on Social Media Today by Kiesha Easley entitled: "5 SEO tips (that won't make readers gouge their eyes out)".

In the post, Kiesha talks about writing the type of content that she wants to write about on her blog and considering SEO as a secondary consideration, which struck a chord with me. If I'm really honest, I very rarely optimise my posts even though I advise clients to. But something about Kiesha's article made me think twice about this approach in specific relation to personal social media optimisation. Your own blog is one of the most effective methods of personal online branding out there, so you should make use of it as such. A regularly updated blog using key, targeted search phrases and keywords is a powerful tool, so for personal branding it makes sense to make sure your own name features somewhere. Hence the title of this post, the link and the use of the phrase 'Paul Sutton' three times in the first 100 odd words.

Then come social media channels that lead naturally from your blog, more and more of which are being indexed by search engines. Favoured by the likes of Google, social media enables you to become involved in numerous communities, from LinkedIn groups to Flickr sharing, and using each of these in conjunction with your search term (in this case, your name) should help yield results in the long term. Especially if you link each channel together using your search term as anchor text. A good personal social media optimisation strategy will involve elements of:

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