Registering your name as a domain name has been common place for a long time. However, some people have more marketable names than others, which might prevent some from registering their names as domain names. Just look at me. My name is Peter Szymczak, which isn’t exactly the most marketable name. Heck, most English speaking people can’t say my last name without having me explain it, let alone try to remember how to type it.

Marketing a company or freelance services under my name, therefore, is not really the best idea. This is why I didn’t register the domain name peterszymczak.com in past; however, recently, I’ve come across a great reason for why you should register your name as a domain name and throw up even a single page, if you can afford it. Having my own web hosting for other projects, registering one extra domain name really only costs me the annual domain registration fee. It may cost you more than that if you don’t have the luxury of having a web server for hosting, but you should probably still do it.

My big reason for registering the domain? The information age is upon us and employers are increasingly googling names of people who apply at their company. The organization I work with does this, and whenever I’m hiring someone, I always throw their name into google. Heck, I even throw co-workers names into google sometimes to see the dirt on them. Having your dot-com name will position you very well in google to turn up as a high search result, if not the first result. I’ve put together a single page for peterszymczak.com, which essentially looks like a business card, and I’m waiting for google to index it right now.

I guess the essential idea here is to regain some control over those search results for your name by registering your dot-com. You’re name is a brand and you should try to regain control over what it means on search engines.