It’s also important for Google juice. I just celebrated 2 months ago as I finally became “The” John Wall thanks to links from Podcamp Toronto. Sadly I was beaten out to my own domain, but I do have john-wall.com

Comment by John Wall
on 04/25/07 at 09:01 AM
 

Great point John.  Everything we do online pertains to Google and ranking.

A great feature for MS Word or any word processor would be to add a tool where you could check for SEO, right there with spelling and grammar checking…

mp/m

Comment by Mike Maddaloni
on 04/25/07 at 09:07 AM
 

Great post Mike and thanks for the reference. I bought my own domain in 1998 when most people weren’t thinking about it. It has been a great branding tool for me.

Comment by Jason Jacobsohn
on 04/25/07 at 11:05 AM
 

Just curious Jason if you own any domain names that are misspellings of your last name?  As we have last names with, um, unique spellings, I know that my own is always misspelled.

I just bought a few versions of Maddaloni, and I was surprised to see some hits come to them already.

mp/m

Comment by Mike Maddaloni
on 04/25/07 at 12:23 PM
 

I own several unique names to brand myself. Beyond just the joejohnson.name and josephjohnson.name domains (my name is not as _unique_ as yours, so the dot-com was already taken), I also have sendjoeanemail.com and emailjoejohnson.com (guess what they’re for), askjoejohnson.com, several variations of joejohnsontest (come in handy for testing applications and web servers), joecanfixu46.com and joecaresaboutkids.com (from my bid to run for the school board in Elgin when I was a senior in High School), 7 or 8 that start with joeloves for the various products I sell (joeloveswindows.com and joelovesmacintosh.com), and another 2 dozen for my family members that requested them. I had another 15 with my name in them, but I let them expire because I never used them, and they were a little farfetched.

Comment by Joe Johnson
on 04/27/07 at 01:26 AM
 

Great list Joe - all keyword rich and easy to remember.

mp/m

Comment by Mike Maddaloni
on 04/28/07 at 01:14 AM
 

Mike, all:

I have a different perspective. I have been using my domain name, exitcreative.net as the name of my online “property”, or the brand name for whatever I do online. Everything I write (comments, posts, etc.) is attributed to my full name: Clay Parker Jones which I try to use (in full) wherever possible.

Because all of my content is under both “Clay Parker Jones” and “Exitcreative”, I feel like I have ownership over these two names/phrases/brands online. In Google, when you search for Exitcreative, you get my site and my profiles on the public web utilities that I use the most (Flickr and Last.fm) along with some other folks that use a combination of those two words. And when you search for my name, you get my site as well as comments that I’ve made or mentions of my name on some of the bigger marketing blogs (MP, BusinessWeek, CK, L+E, etc.). And that’s all I really need. But I feel like consolidating under a “Brand Name” and your “Author Name” is a good strategy for me.

Comment by Clay Parker Jones
on 05/07/07 at 02:34 PM