You would be forgiven for thinking I was going to get all philosophical with this post, but actually I’m referring to understanding my current online presence.

Today I started John Thornhill’s One Month Mentor programme – and the first thing he recommends is to get yourself a .com domain derived from your name, to use as your personal blog.  Now since I’m already using this site (paulhutchings.me) I haven’t registered anything else, but I would have registered paulhutchings.com if it had been available.

That address was actually registered in 2007 and the current owner (unsurprisingly called Paul Hutchings) hasn’t yet done anything with it.  It’s a long shot, but I will contact the owner near to the next expiry (July this year) and see if he might be willing to give it up.

Coincidentally Paulhutchings.co.uk is taken by an artist (my wife’s an artist) and paulhutchings.net is taken by an internet marketer (which is what I’m aspiring to be).

Next, I thought it would be fun to see if I could find myself anywhere in the Google search rankings.  I figured it would be a good first goal to try and get myself to appear within the first 10 pages of search results based on my name; and to my pleasant surprise, this blog already appears on page 9! Now I know that if you’re on page 9 of a Google search, you may as well be on page 99 – but it’s a good omen for the future, given that paulhutchings.me only 3 weeks old.

It also confirms what most people now seem to be saying about Google rankings related to domain extensions; there were some that believed that Google preferred the ‘.com’ extensions over others; but the general consensus now appears to be that it’s the quality of the content and amount of interaction on sites that matters most.

I shall keep an eye on my rankings over the weeks and see if I can get to that prestigious page 1.