Have you been the victim of having just one or two listings on page one of the SERPs for your [personal or business] name along side your competitors or other seemingly irrelevant listings? Maybe this is just annoying, in the case of your personal name (brand), and maybe it’s costing you money because your competitors are listed alongside you tempting your prospects to visit them as well.

Either way, you can quickly and easily fix this problem with the use of social media profiles, which have great reputations and when used properly will jump to the top of the search engines knocking out your competitors.

There are hundreds of social sites out there, and I don’t recommend creating profiles with the express purpose of abandoning the profile page after obtaining link. Find the social media sites that make sense for you and build them up as a means of spreading your name/brand across different networks of people; bringing more eyeballs to you, and as a result bringing more page one results for your name/brand.

Some social sites to consider:

  • Amazon – Perfect for anyone who reads. Share your experience, thoughts and feelings.
  • Facebook- Great for finding old friends/co-workers and adding a business/product page.
  • LinkedIn- This is where business people socialize, post their resume, review/recommend each other.
  • Flickr – Upload your photos to share with the world. Be sure to provide a link in your description.
  • YouTube – Upload your videos. Add your link.
  • Twitter – Micro-blogging. Make friends and blog away. Be sure to complete your bio so you can score good listings in Twellow.
  • Digg – Post your favorite stories, blogs, etc. You can also vote for stories already Dugg.
  • Delicious – Save your favorite bookmarks to this social bookmarking software where others can see your bookmarks as well.
  • FriendFeed – A mashup of social profile feeds. I’m still learning but it’s worth looking in to.
  • MyBlogLog – Find friends based on similar interests in blogs. Also, when logged in, your profile shows up on blogs you read.
  • Squidoo – Expert lenses (pages) about specific topics.
  • Yelp – Review local businesses.
  • InsiderPages – Review local businesses.
  • Technorati – Track the blogosphere.
  • Upcoming – Schedule/Find events you’re planning to attend.

This list is very short compared to what is really available out there and finding as many of these sites that you can maintain in a given month (or so) will provide you with traffic, links, and friends (who know people).

Make sure you complete your profile at each site with your name, url, preferences, likes/dislikes, etc. All of this information is used to pair you up with others in the network.

Within a few days of filling out these profiles you begin to see your profile pages showing up at the top of the SERPs knocking other top 10 pages off to page 2 thereby decreasing your competition.

I can’t stress enough the importance of maintaining each of these profiles. If you create a profile strictly for a free link, you may as well stop reading and forget everything I said. Otherwise you leave your profile page open to abuse from others flaming you for trying to gets links. You will effectively upset people and kill your reputation. Besides you only need a few of these profiles to knock out your competitors from page one.