Your Name Can Be The Strongest Tool You Have in Search Engine Optimization or The Worst
My name is actually not special, John D. Cumberland. John is what hospitals name you when they don’t know who you are. Jaid is derived from my initials, J.D.C. I was referred to as J.D. growing up because of the prevalence of other family members also named John. We have quite a few Janes as well. Despite the lack of originality in our names, we are actually a very close family and take time to get together often. My 4 year old niece loved to ride on my shoulders and would call to me to pick her up. She couldn’t yet correctly pronounce “J.D.” so she would call me “Jade”, and the name stuck. Within my family, this was my pet name and it has stayed with me until this day.
Edenjaid is the character I play on a popular online fantasy game called World of Warcraft. She leads eight guilds total with nearly 10,000 active members across three servers. Eden is infamous among this niche. And her guild, Ørion is among the oldest on the game. Before the search engines changed the way they rank searches, simply searching “Edenjaid” on Google would net you nearly 100,000 relevant hits. Today, searching Edenjaid on Google will only net you around 2000 relevant hits. But this is still quite impressive for a humble night elf. How is this relevant to SEO?
Ørion’s website and blog was displaying Google Adsense advertisement for a while as a means to supplement our site host fees. Upon checking my Adsense account, I noticed that I had a lot of clicks. I mean a lot. In our first month of hosting Adsense, Ørion had earned nearly $2000 in revenue! Over the span of 11 months we had earned nearly $30,000 in ad revenue. Now before you run out and get your Warcraft Game from Walmart and host Adsense it’s important to note that I got banned from Adsense. I had a membership base of nearly 10,000 and they were clicking my ads, thinking they were helping the site. They were, just not within Google’s terms of service. After the ban, I felt lucky two nerds dressed in smart black business suits donning Ray-Bans and pocket protectors hadn’t yet arrived at my door offering me a ride to an undisclosed location.
My experience was quite by accident, having no idea how online marketing worked and very little understanding of how advertising could be manipulated. I also had two of perhaps the most important tools in online marketing. I had a highly marketable name, and thousands of potential customers. The incident with Adsense could have gotten me into serious trouble. I only post my story to dissuade readers from making the same mistakes I did. I will never be able to have an Adsense account again. That is gone for me.
This was my first lesson in online marketing and advertising. After the Adsense ban, I noticed any site that bore the name of Edenjaid began to net big profits for online sales. Soon Eden was all over the search engines, popping up in places where she had no business being. She began to be featured in online articles having no connection to her at all. Before long, Eden even received the ultimate honor usually reserved for celebrities. She was faked and posted nude on the internet! I received none of these profits and had sullied the good name of my little night elf. I vowed to make amends.
Today, Edenjaid receives considerably less search engine results but those results are no longer questionable. Eden is turning over a new leaf and marketing her name in a respectable way. The good name of my little night elf is slowing becoming a household word again on the search engines. Having learned her lesson, she limits the use of her extensive membership base to in game raids and attacks and no longer wields them upon unsuspecting search engines.
Image Credit : Edenjaid.
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