Baby Name Optimization Like College Fund: Invest Now

Baby Name Optimization

by David Berkowitz, Tuesday, May 29, 2007
WANT PROOF that you can optimize anything? What about devising a strategy to optimize search results around the name of your unborn offspring?

The idea came from a snippet on Boston.com sent in by loyal reader (and future wife) Cara Adelglass: "According to The Wall Street Journal, some expectant parents are beginning to Google prospective baby names to ensure that their kids won't face too much competition in securing a high search rank.' What's the perfect baby shower present for a soon-to-be newborn who has already been search-engine optimized? Buy the Web domain that matches their name."

That's sound strategizing. It has that echo of Jack Welch, who insisted that General Electric should only be in businesses where it could take first or second place in market share. By that line of thought, Joe Smith is probably not your best bet unless you're spending millions on optimization, and celebrity names are out of the question (alas, that rules out Brad Pitt Berkowitz as a potential name for my future progeny).

You don't want to stop just at the research phase, though. Below are ten more tips for baby name optimization. Note that while this column is tongue-in-cheek, these best practices can be applied to your business. You'd want to research potential business and product names for what listings come up in major search engines, and you'd often be wise to apply many of the baby name optimization tactics that follow.

1) Write a press release the day your baby's born with the baby's name in the headline, and optimize the entire release. As soon as the little one takes its first breath, he or she can even appear in the body of Google's natural search results thanks to universal search.

2) Buy all potential domain name misspellings of your baby's name. If you're blessed with ample foresight or come from an ages-old tradition of arranged marriages, buy versions of the last name of any potential suitor you have in mind. Redirect the names to your baby's main dot-com domain.

3) Film the birth and syndicate it to dozens of video sites. One of those sites will have to be around by the time of your kid's communion or bar mitzvah, right? On your primary domain, optimize the video by tagging every second of it so those clips are accessible to search engine spiders.

4) Blog as if you're the baby. Then, when your kid is old enough to blog, you can hand it over to your child, or you can go on blogging as if you're his or her therapist.

5) Tag your baby.

6) Create a Wikipedia entry for your baby. If it's rejected, claim that one of the parents is Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Paris Hilton, David Arquette, Oprah, or all of the above.

7) Googlebomb your baby's domain around the phrase "world's cutest baby," "future Nobel laureate," or "Harvard class of 2025." It reminds me of an old joke, where a parent is asked how old her children are and responds, "The doctor is three and the lawyer is two." The scary thing: some parent is reading this column right now and starting such a Googlebomb.

8) Digg your baby.

9) Be sure to update meta tags every so often, as your kid's prom date would be horrified to see "spitting up" and "potty training" as some of his or her most relevant keywords.

10) Every few years, change your child's name to something new that has less search competition. Though beware... this will bring an entirely new meaning to the phrase "your baby's in the sandbox."

Of course, all of this is in your child's best interests. When admissions officers and employers search for your child's name years from now, they'll find so many results ahead of those keg party pictures on Facebook that the reputation management will have paid off. Marketers often talk about their brands as their babies; here's a chance to treat your babies like your brands.

Post your response to the public Search Insider blog.

See what others are saying on the Search Insider blog.
David Berkowitz is director of emerging media at 360i. You can reach him at dberkowitz@360i.com. 

Search Insider for Tuesday, May 29, 2007: http://publications.mediapost.com/
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