At the moment, I’m looking into getting off-site hosting of some sort. I figure if I do ever manage to get any traffic on the site (it could happen…), I might want to be able to handle it…

Anyhow, just in case…

Check search engine guidelines for more details…

Google – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8458

(The Google link is a better one than I posted before…)

Yahoo – http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/ssb_gl.php

That’s the human-friendly part.

The only way around it is to do both, though you’d likely want to look into some sort of redirect to the machine friendly domain for the search engines.

(I still haven’t sorted out the best way to do that… probably a permanent redirect on the domain.)

It would be easier if the greys between white hat and black hat SEO didn’t exist.

Actually doubling up might work fine, Google seem to have rewritten their content guidelines… ( http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&topic=8456 )

[Yahoo! seem to still frown on it... ( http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/ssb_gl.php )]

I suppose you’re not really trying to capture a highly competitive market though, so… take it all with a grain of salt! :-)

Not that I expect to have to tell people a URL very often (but you never know, I guess). It’s just that, looking around, for most personal sites, the “all one word” thing is what most people seem to do.

Has to do with separating the name (otherwise people would only really benefit by ramming everything together).

[So, you end up making the choice of human-friendly vs. machine-friendly... but if people being able to search you out is a goal, machine-friendly is the place to start...]

It’s probably time I registered darcycasselman.com. I like flyingsquirrel.ca a lot. If I want to take ownership of my online identity, though, that’s the way to do it. It’ll probably just stay an alias for a while, though. We’ll see.

Yahoo! and Live Search yield similar results (though your old csclub page comes up via Live Search).

You could submit to dmoz.org (they have an apparently diminishing impact, but… )

You could try one of the following categories…

http://www.dmoz.org/Society/People/Personal_Homepages/

http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Online_Writing/Journals/Personal/

http://www.dmoz.org/Society/People/Personal_Homepages/Weblogs/

(regional would be better still…)

I’d count on a relatively lengthy wait, but you’d be covered.

[Aren't the tools cool?]

In any event, since you’re tackling your name as part of your SEO efforts, you’re in good stead.

WordPress will help a great deal.

You might want to see about mangling your URLs to include your name though — otherwise flyingsquirrel.ca, the date and things like this post title (ie. the-vagaries-of-pagerank) get caught.

Aliasing your account to use your name is another option (rather than “flying squirrel”).

Lastly, as you noted, getting linked is probably the best way to start the push towards entering the rankings. Putting out notifications on post to those blogging services might help — just be careful (Google reportedly just revised PageRank for a ton of sites — theoretically based on link selling, etc.).

I don’t think you’ll have any trouble, it’ll just take some time.

Best of luck!