You might be surprised to know that a number of individuals who search for BlogaPro enter the keyword ‘Gavin Smith blog’ instead of the term ‘BlogaPro’.

In fact, the searches against my name are so high on some days that they outnumber the number of searches for the name of the blog. It’s no coincidence.

People Associate by Name

It goes without saying that people associate by name. While some obviously associate the blog by its name, others associate the brand by its author.

The importance of creating word associations hasn’t dawned upon me until recently after conducting an in-depth analysis into visitor’s search behavior.

Most recently, I’ve been taking steps to enhance the probability that visitors form memorable word associations in order to increase the ratio of return visitors to new visitors

But I have one particular problem. Unfortunately, I am not the most popular Gavin Smith at least according to Google. There are a few who are slightly more famous than I. In particular, there is a Canadian professional poker-player who shares the same name. Needless to say, he is so famous that he warrants his own dedicated page in Wikipedia.

As I have suggested in a previous article, Wikis are deemed valuable by search engines. As a result, his Wikipedia entry ranks in at the number one spot for the phrase ‘Gavin Smith’, but he is in for a fight at least if I can help it.

Importance of Word Association

Consider the ratio of people who know the author Darren Rowse by name versus the number of people who know about his blog.  I think you would find that they are quite comparable.  Now consider the number of visitors that ProBlogger acquires after individuals have entered the search term of ‘Darren Rowse’ or ‘ProBlogger’ into their favorite search engine?

As a blogger, it is important to market, design and publish posts on your blog with word association in mind.

Four tips to encourage word associations:

1. If you have ever had doubts about publishing an ‘About’ section on your blog, hopefully I have changed your mind.  Include a bit of biographical information about yourself and your blog.  It doesn’t have to be too in-depth just something that your readers can relate to.  Clearly state your name in the autobiography.
2. Consider publishing your own article to MyWikiBiz, a Wikipedia alternative.  In order to compete with the likes of the aforementioned poker player, I committed my own article about Gavin Smith (myself) in an attempt to compete for that number one spot
3. Focus on attempting to improve the ranking of your personal name and the name of your blog within the likes of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live.  Doing this is easier said than done and falls down to old-fashioned SEO techniques.
4. Ensure that the name of your blog is clearly visible on each page.  Does your site’s domain name correspond to the name of your blog?  If not, consider a change…