I set up this website as my own 'Personal Brand'. In setting the site up, I had to really ask myself the question - am I doing this out of an ego-massage, or am I doing this because it's important in my industry to be recognised for who and what I am, what I know, and how I can help people?
Ego is a big thing in Buddhism, as it is a clear way of seeing yourself as separate to other people, and of course to be thinking of being better than others - when in fact, this is the root of many issues, from being unkind to other people to international wars - but that's a whole other blog post in itself!
When I set up this site, I wasn't entirely convinced, but it did give me a place to tell people a bit about how I got to where I am now (trust me, I didn't just wake up one morning and decide I wanted to be a web designer and run a business - I originally wanted to be a marine engineering officer in the Royal Navy!).
Recently, some changes in the way that Google uses Google+ profiles and hooks this up with data from around the web has made me really take a step back and go 'Wow, so it really is happening!'. Over the past year I've been making a half-hearted attempt to rank in Google for the highly competitive term 'Joomla Specialist' - this is what I do, it's what our company does, therefore it makes sense to want to rank well for it. Initially I didn't rank in the top ten pages of search results, now I'm coming up on page 1 for 'Joomla Specialist' and 'Joomla Specialist UK' when logged out of Google Services - even higher if you're already in my Google+ Circles.
Over the next few weeks I'll be writing a few blogs on how I achieved this, what tools are available to help you rank well in search engines, and some little nuggets of information I've picked up along the way. I won't be giving everything away though, as I'll be speaking at the Joomla! World Conference in San Jose this November on Google+, Authorship and Microdata - I'd recommend anyone involved with Joomla! comes along!
