If i want to get my name to the top of search engines to be found by lost friends or relatives....?

[Ted Pack]

I come up first for "Ted Pack" in Google, but I have a web site, I've posted answers to over 8,000 questions here on Y!A and another couple of thousand on real genealogy bulletin boards and I have been using the WWW since 1998.

Companies who want to get to the top of the search engines for phrases like "Home mortgage", "cheap air fare", "viagra by mail", "naked babes" and "hotel packages" will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to SEO consultants; SEO is "Search Engine Optimization".

The search engines, in turn, keep exactly how they rank sites a secret. They want to deliver the most useful information possible, so that we web surfers keep using them instead of their competitors, and, in turn, keep reading the advertisements they sell, instead of the advertisements their competitors sell.

Suppose "Acme Fly-by-Nite", which offered full price and slow service, discovered that the more pictures of airplanes you had on your site, the higher Google ranked your site for the term "Discount Air fares". They would put 400,000 tiny images of airplanes on their site, and they would come up first in Google for "Discount air fare". If Viagra sellers did the same with pills and home mortgage refinancing companies did the same with houses, pretty soon people would use Yahoo! or MSN instead of Google.

Your "presence" counts; someone named Ted Pack who had a facebook page instead of http://www.tedpack.org,and had answered 400 or so questions, would rank below me in a search engine. How many people link to you counts. Beyond that is a dark secret.

Google has a rather technical article about ranking here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters...swer=35769

If you are not an experienced web designer, amateur or professional, your chances of getting to be first are small. You CAN register with adoption boards, as one person has already said. You CAN hope to come up first for the combination of your name, and the town and state your daughter was born in.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not the world's greatest SEO expert. As proof, I'm still trying - and failing - to get my church to come up first for "Turlock Unitarian". The Unitarian Universalist church I go to is in Modesto, California but serves the entire county; Turlock is the second largest city in the county. We have a dozen members from Turlock, and if you live there and want a UU church, we're the only option. Our church site comes up fourth for those two words.

I'm sorry to be such a wet blanket. I wish you the best of luck.