Personal Branding Sites – A Must Have

It’s no secret that personal branding has become huge lately. In today’s society, brands are everything. Don’t believe me? Just look at the logo on your t-shirt or shoes.

In the field of SEO and marketing, it’s just as important to market yourself as a brand as it is for larger companies like Nike and Coke. When it comes down to it, anybody selling consulting services is really just selling themselves. Willy Loman knew it, but it took a long time for it to finally become prominent on the web.

dotCULT does a great job for me, but it’s more of my blog and less about selling me as a professional. So, I’ve downloaded the latest version of WordPress and this cool new Ipseity theme and got to work. It’s a pretty simple theme and I had it up and running in no time. Check it out on my new personal site: Ryan Jones.

I haven’t fully decided between RyanMJones.com, RyanJones.ws, or RyanJones.info – however I may just use it to do some 301/302 style testing on search results in the future. Let me know which domain name you like better and why.

The only issue I had with the Ipseity theme is that it doesn’t work without Javascript, so it would be pretty hard for search engines to find the 2nd and 3rd page data. I fixed that by switching WordPress over to custom URLS, and adding in links to each post individually that only show up if a user has JavaScript disabled. You’ll notice it also removes the arrow links for users without JavaScript, as they wouldn’t work anyway.

It’s a pretty clever technique that makes the site useful and “cool” for users, while still showing links to the content to search engines. It’s still not perfect from an SEO perspective, but the folks at Ipseity have gotten off to a good start and I’m going to keep tweaking at the theme.

July 18th, 2009