It can be difficult to make a name for yourself when you are starting out as an engineer. And even if you are an experienced professional, you may be trapped in a cubical with no 'presence' in the outside world, but we can change all that...

Why would anyone want to establish a serious presence on the Internet? Well, one obvious reason is that when you are applying for a new job, today's employers will typically perform a wide-ranging Internet search to see what you've been up to.

Hopefully your contributions to sites like Facebook primarily consist of happy entries with photos of your family and pets and suchlike (as opposed to long-winded rants and diatribes against your local government and high-tech employers [grin]). Seriously, a lot of folks have discovered that things they've posted on sites like Facebook have come back to bite them in their nether regions when they are seeking a new position.

The point is that – when you are applying for an engineering position or a scientific or high-technology job, it's much more impressive to potential employers when they perform an Internet search if they find you associated with things of a professional nature.

Try going to www.Google.com and entering your name. How many hits did you get? I just did a search on my name "Clive Maxfield" (without the quotes, of course) and got 1,940,000 hits. This sort of thing really helps with regard to me landing work as a freelance writer, because the first thing a potential new client requests is examples of my work. In addition to showing them whitepapers and other "stuff", I tell them to do a search for "Clive Maxfield" on www.Amazon.com to see my books and on Google to establish that there's a batting chance I have some clue as to what I'm waffling on about.

Of course, you might not be interested in penning full-blown technical articles (the vast majority of engineers really don’t enjoy writing things of this ilk). But don’t despair; turn that frown upside down into a smile, because there are easier ways to get your name out into the big wide world.

Take TechBites.com for example. Once you've joined (it's free of course), you can write smaller pieces such as book reviews and product reviews and tech-tips. The fact that you are posting them on a respected site like TechBites.com immediately gives them "weight" and credibility (when I say "respected" in this context, I mean that search engines like Google regard TechBites.com as a credible and trustworthy site based on its content and the fact that other sites link to us and our articles).

If you've just read an interesting book, it really doesn’t take long to write a review saying how good it is. Similarly, if you've just used a dreadful software application or purchased a useless artifact like a cheap-and-cheerful GPS location finder that seems incapable of working out which country you are in, then it doesn’t take long to write a review saying how useless it is.

If you're reading the book anyway, why not write a review on it?

Or maybe you've just come up with a cunning way around a tricky design problem or an interesting way to use a design tool, in which case it will take only a few moments to write up a short "Tech-Tip" to spread the word around.

BUT WAIT! If you are going to write reviews and/or tech-tips and/or any other type of content item, there's something you need to know that can really make a huge difference with regard to establishing your presence on the Internet.

My old chum Jay Dowling just pointed me at an interesting article titled Why Google and Other Humans Don't Read Your Book Reviews. The gist of this article is that you need to use an appropriate title for your article, and include an appropriate description, and include appropriate keywords. This article also talks about what happens if you don’t do these things – for example, it describes a brilliant book review by the L.A. Times that didn’t follow the rules and thus does not appear within the first three pages of Google results (if you aren’t in the first couple of pages you aren’t anywhere – very few users progress beyond the first couple of pages of results).

When you use the TechBites Content Creation editor, in addition to the main body of your review (or article, blog, or tech-tip) you will see areas into which you enter your Title, Meta-Description, and Meta-Keywords (Click Here to see a step-by-step article on how to use this editor). As an example, consider a review I wrote a couple of months ago on a book called Reinventing Gravity by John Moffat (Click Here to see this review).

The title I used was "Book Review: Reinventing Gravity" (after reading the Google article above, I now realize that I should actually have used "Book Review: Reinventing Gravity by John Moffat". That is, the title should contain all of the relevant information: This is a "Book Review", the book is called "Reinventing Gravity", and the author is "John Moffat".

The Meta-Description (remember this is presented as a field for you to complete in the Content Creation Editor) should also include all of these items presented in a way that will make them attract the reader's interest, because this description will ultimately appear as the text associated with the link on the search engine's results page. For example, a suitable description might be:

Book review of Reinventing Gravity by Physicist John Moffat – the author walks through the theories of gravity from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein; he then goes on to explain a new Modified Gravity theory called MOG.

Last but not least, the comma-separated list of Meta-Keywords (also presented as a field for you to complete in the Content Creation Editor) should include any relevant items:

Book Review, Reinventing Gravity, John Moffat, Modified Gravity Theory, MOG, Clive Maxfield, Max Maxfield

Observe that I've included Modified Gravity Theory and MOG in my keywords, because these back up the Meta-Description text and also the text in the body of my review. Also – and very importantly in the context of establishing one's presence on the Internet – I've included my name Clive Maxfield and my nickname/penname Max Maxfield.

So does doing this really make a difference? Well, I just performed a search on Google for "Book Review Reinventing Gravity" (without the quotes of course) and my review on TechBites.com came out #6, which is really rather good when you come to think about the number of reviews that have been written on this book.

I emailed Jay to say that I was already using the techniques described in the article he's sent me and that my book review had come back #6. Jay responded that if I did a Google search on "Book Review Bebop to the Boolean Boogie", the review Jay had written on this book (which was penned by yours truly) came back #3 in the results list (Click Here to see Jay's review).

Well, that's a challenge if ever I saw one, so I went off and performed Google searches on some other reviews I'd written:

Google search: “book review in search of time”
My review came out #5 (Click Here to see this review)

Google search: “book review wetware”
My review came out #4 (Click Here to see this review)

Google search: “book review uc/OS-III”
My review came out #1 (Click Here to see this review)

Yes! I can live with #1 (grin).

But this isn’t about me, it's about you... let's not wander off into the weeds and forget the ultimate goal of this article, which is for you to establish your own presence on the Internet. The bottom line is that if you are applying for a new job somewhere and your potential employer performs an Internet search on your name and discovers a bunch of reviews you've penned on engineering and/or scientific and/or technical books – also possibly some technical tips you've shared – you can trust me that this is going to carry a lot more weight than any holiday and party pictures you've posted on Facebook (grin).