Checking my website’s visitor statistics today, I found a lot of entries for the keyword “Stephen Appiah”. So people who are looking for information about Stephen Appiah, the famous Ghanaian footballer, end up on my website!

And because I have so much time on my hands these days, I decided to do a little digging around to find out how this successful footballer is managing his affairs online. Sad to say, I wasn’t impressed at all.

First, the website http://www.StephenAppiah.com doesn’t belong to Stephen Appiah. From the public WHOIS records, the domain name “stephenappiah.com” belongs to one Murat Akal from Instanbul, Turkey.

Surprised? Just remember the cardinal rule of the domain name game: names available strictly on a first-come-first-served basis. The only exception to this is trademarks, which can be contested. But the last time I asked, no one could claim a trademark for his/her name.

The official website for Stephen Appiah is www.StepApp.com, which is also the home for his non-profit StepApp Foundation, as well as his fashion brand StepApp.

This site appears on the first page of the search results for the the keyword “Stephen Appiah” on all the three major search Engines: Google, Yahoo and Live (Microsoft). So why do people still end up on my website, which is buried so deeply away?

That’s easy enough to figure out: the unscrupulous firm working on the website have decided to use their client’s website to promote themselves, instead of their client. This is the first page of a Google search for “Stephen Appiah”:

As you can see, Stephen Appiah’s official website is the third on the page, but it doesn’t mention his name at all — not in the title, and not in the description (actually there’s no description at all). It only says StepApp :: Powered by AccurrateConsult.com (the web design firm working on the website).

So unless you know the non-profit and fashion brand StepApp already, you’re not going to associate that site with the Ghanaian footballer. And if you know StepApp already, you’re likely to go directly to the site instead of searching for what you already know.

Does Stephen Appiah know about this? I doubt he does. Would he care if he knew? I doubt he would. Should he? Absolutely. And I’ll tell you why he should in an upcoming post.

When I first registered the domain georgeappiah.com for this website, one of my goals was to control my identity online. I knew that while I couldn’t control what someone would write about me, I could have much say in what people discovered about me through a web search. And I wanted to make it easy for people to find what I wanted them to find about — about me.

So after many turns and twists and two fatal database crashes, today if you google “George Appiah” (without quotes), you’ll find information about me all over. At the time of this writing, the entire first page results (1-10 web pages) were all about me. In fact, but for a few usurpers, the entire initial 100 websites (first ten SERPS) would have been about me.

Obviously I’ve more than exceeded that particular goal of controlling my online identity, even though — I will confess — I’ve not done a decent job at building one coherent personal brand yet. More about that later.

But I want more, ya know. I’m up with another goal, this time a more specific and measurable goal: I want to be the #1 on the search result page for the name “Appiah”. Here’s the current competition:

As you can see, Stephen Appiah’s Wikipedia entry is right at the top. That his name is at the top is neither surprising nor interesting at all to me. What’s interesting to me though is that his personal website, www.stephenappiah.com does not appear on the first page at all.

Aside this Stephen Appiah anomaly, the rest of the page, and in fact, most of the first 100 results, is dominated by Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University (no relation to the soon-to-be Prof. George Kwabenah Appiah ).

This is the competition I’m putting myself against now. I don’t have any plans yet to win at this game, but I’m going to cook some ideas and share the progress over here.