Have you ever typed your name into Google and the other search engines only to find a bunch of people or things that have nothing to do with you?

I did several months ago only to find my myspace page, which wasn’t designed to be viewed by the public, an old court order that revoked my insurance license and about four other people with the same name. Unfortunately, what people put online about you can come back to bite you and the court order didn’t say anything about not providing a new set of fingerprint cards. I’ve challenging the decision, but negative public records can harm anyone’s credibility without even giving them the opportunity to show why it happened. The worst part about finding this stuff online was realizing that no one knows about your accomplishments or track record unless you write an article, blog or profile about it. This is especially true if some of your companies are no longer operating, and it’s difficult to provide work references when you’re the owner of a company. So what should you do?

Flood the internet with positive, unegotistical PR about you to drown out the negative stuff and make sure that you always come up first in any search about you. Many companies pay thousands of dollars every month for search engine optimization on a single site, but the great news is that you don’t have to do that. This is because no one is selling Daniel Nase’s on ten or twenty sites, while paying for SEO (search engine optimization).

Doing it is relatively simple. Just create free online profiles that show people who you are and what you do. After you’re done with that, write reasonably intelligent articles and get them posted in blogs and free online article sites. You might even consider creating your own forum to help people by offering expert advice about something that you know a lot about; just make sure that your name is listed in the title with the name of the article and that you write your name in or at the bottom of the article.

It also adds a lot of credibility to the information you post online if you can cite online sources who have articles that back up your claims. These online sources may not be available at first, which means you might have to call them and politely ask for permission to post your article or something backing up your claims on their site.

For example, in the summer of 1997 I had a prestigeous internship with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that resulted in designing the nuclear devices that provide electrical energy to deep space satellites and the organization that put me their called MSEP had no record that I was ever on an internship, so I had to track down specific people on the internet like Scott Minnix to verify that I had an internship and what I worked on, so a letter could be added to my file. So the point is to check your own references before someone else does and make sure that the information they have is accurate and matchs what you actually did. Otherwise, people will assume that you made it all up.