Recently, a lot of folks have noticed their Twitter pages superseding their blogs in Google search results for their name. Tech journalist Marshall Kirkpatrick has an easy HTML workaround to keep Twitter from becoming your primary online identity.
Having a say in what Google says about you is extremely important these days, especially for professionals such as freelancers, for whom a Google search result of their name is a first impression for potential employers. You definitely want your blog or professional web site to show up before your non-professional social networking profiles. Kirkpatrick discovered a small HTML tag that was missing from his own blog, yet present in Twitter, that could make all the difference:
So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel='me' to a relevant link on your blog. I've added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that's a good page for me. It's as simple as making the link text read a href='http://marshallk.com/feedback' rel='me'.
It's not necessarily a foolproof solution, but it should help (and certainly shouldn't hurt). If you've got any other useful tips to keep your blog or personal site at the top of search engines, let us know in the comments.
