Significance of a Space on my Life

Given the visit from Patrick today, I'll write about my personal journey in branding myself online.

My name is AungMaw MyoLwin. It used to be Aung Maw Myo Lwin with spaces--it is common practice in Burma to spell out each syllable as a word in English. The removal of spaces is so insignificant a change that there was not even a formal process.

Where it was significant, however, is with Google, and consequently my career.

2009, Name: Aung Maw Myo Lwin

I was graduating from college in a year and looking for a job. Recruiters would google my name and arrive at a result similar to this:

Red boxes are the irrelevant results. The only valid link was my college link starting with www.wooster.edu. Recruiters were being thrown off by many Aung's and Lwin's (common name in Burma). Whatever a random guy Aung Maw is doing in Burma is tied to my profile. No fault to the recruiters of course; they had no way of knowing how common such a weird name is. Throw into the mix their unfamiliarity with the country itself, and you have a confused recruiter who would rather look at the next resume.

2010, Name: AungMaw MyoLwin

I removed spaces in my resume. I updated my LinkedIn and Facebook names to the new name. I went to college IT to update the display name on my emails. BOOM! (Okay, the search results didn't update right away. My understanding is that you have to allow time for Google's bots to get around to indexing the new information.) But anyways... BOOM! My search results looked much better. As far as Google was concerned, AungMaw MyoLwin was a new phrase. Remember our class speaker saying how the difference between Pat and Patrick is significant? I cannot agree more. My LinkedIn page shot up to the top spot, followed by my Facebook, which I kept very PG-13.

In a way, my name forced me to learn some basics of SEO. I then found a job.

Present, Name: AungMaw MyoLwin

I built on my SEO knowledge and developed my online presence. I bought out both www.aungmaw.com and www.aungmawmyolwin.com domains to reserve it. During Thanksgiving break of 2013, I decided to teach myself HTML5 and built out a personal website. Today, I'm at a happy place with the search results for "AungMaw MyoLwin" (static screenshot below)--all the top organic links are mine.

Certianly still more work to be done. My next steps are to:

• Attach a blog to my site and develop a habit of blogging weekly. This post is the start.
• Look into reserving other domains like .net, .org, etc. Is it even worth the money? I don't know yet.
• Get linked to my site from popular sites. [See how I subtly did that in this post? :)]