The benefits of creating a micro website about yourself

Search engine optimization is about obtaining the best possible performance from search referral traffic. That means you want the traffic to be interested in your content and you want the people searching for your content to be able to easily find your content. So when "you" are the topic of the query, having a micro website does sometimes make sense.

In fact, every Web searchable social media profile you create is a micro website; your Twitter account, your Linkedin profile, your Pinterest board, your Facebook page — these are all little sites that tell people something about you. Google+ gives you the ability — through its (now drifting) Authorship markup — to create a hub for your micro websites so that people can see where your content may be found. You can link to social media profiles or blogs where you contribute content.

Who really needs a Micro Website?

With all these social media options, you have to ask who really needs anything more, like a dedicated, branded micro website. We can still go for the vanity option and create our own personal domains but if you don’t do much with that domain you’re probably not going to see a lot of traffic to it. In fact, if your name is shared by one or more celebrities, Google’s current set of algorithms may bury you in bullshit about the celebrities.

There are certainly some professional benefits to being found for your name, but there are also drawbacks. For example, if you have a colorful online life you should probably be glad that prospective employers are not finding so much information about you when they search your name.

Then again, if you’re a professional SEO and you cannot be found for your name, people may look askance of your skills. It’s a tough decision even for a marketer. So I think the answer to the question “who really needs a micro website” comes down to whomever really can benefit from one in some measurable way.

Simply building a micro website around your name for a vanity purpose is taking on potentially a lot of SEO challenge for a relatively small reward. There are probably better things you can do with your time to promote yourself online.

What about Micro Websites for reputation management?

Some people are so disturbed by the nasty, hostile content published under their names (and found in the search results) that they build a dozen or maybe several dozen micro websites about themselves. This strategy may work in weak queries but it’s a good way to draw attention to yourself. After all, if you’re not a celebrity and people who know who you are start to find dozens of Websites about you, it will be pretty obvious to them you’re trying to take control of the SERPs. 

Celebrities, wealthy business people, and corporations do sometimes invest in the micro website strategy for reputation management. I have tried to steer my clients away from populating their SERPs with vanity Websites; I favor creating useful, task-specific Websites that can provide some visibility (and shielding) for a contested name space. A large corporation may already have an existing set of Websites that can be tweaked or enhanced to do the job, for example.

Now with a lot of marketing attention, budget, and emphasis directed toward creating and managing active social media communities around brands peppering a corporate name (or even a personal name space) with a dozen social media profiles looks natural — provided they serve a purpose. Creating an empty YouTube channel is kind of silly and it’s not going to be able to compete well against hostile content.

The Vanity Query is still so much fun!

It’s true that some people like to have fun with their name space. Especially when your name is unusual, you can create content that is interesting and engaging and people probably won’t be offended when they search about you. After all, they’re not likely to be looking for anyone else by your name, right?

Vanity query optimization has assumed a permanent place in the search engine optimization practices category. It’s not necessarily a big money-maker but it can be a good practice ground for people who are learning how to manage complicated SEO campaigns. Competing against yourself can also help you identify better practices for creating content. So vanity query optimization is a good training ground for anyone who is new to SEO. But you should pursue vanity query optimization responsibly. You could be generous and populate your name space with content about someone else (as I did a few years ago) but that other person may one day come to overshadow you. You may one day want to take back that name space and suddenly find that you’re competing with professional news media, and that’s not so easy an SEO campaign.

So think long and hard before you try to take control over a shared name space. It’s not just about drawing attention to yourself, or blotting out unwanted content, it’s also about what happens to the other people who share your name.