I won’t lie: I google myself.  A lot.  Usually in the dark with a glass of merlot.  Without pants on.

What’s cool about my name is that it’s very difficult for people to remember how to spell.  Most people desperately want to spell my last name “Bellville”, but that’s just not how it’s spelled.  My name is spelled Belville and there’s just no way that’s going to change.  I don’t like the Bellville spelling.  It seems off somehow.  Belleville is better but I’m just not that French.  And so I have my bastardized surname of Belville, which is also a line of Lego toys for girls, if you didn’t know that already.

I bring this up because if you google “Josh Belville”, this website is the first result.  More importantly, the first page is all me: Myspace, Facebook, last.fm, thesixtyone, even burn out sites like The Next Big Sound and LinkedIn.  It’s all me.  Whoa, I even make the whole second page!  And the third page!  And the fourth!

Even if you don’t put quotes in Google when you search my name, it still is all me.  If you search “joshua belville”, the first site that pops up is my acting/music website.  Point being not so much that I have mastered the art of SEO, but more that I have just the right amount of Unusual to my name.

Unfortunately that means bunk if you don’t know how to spell it.

If you search “zornog”, with the notable exception of King Zornog from the Star Wars comic books¹, it’s all me for the first page.  And the second.

So the question becomes: how important is this?  How important is it to be so integrated into Google when no one knows how to properly spell your name?  Should I add “bellville” into my meta tags so that people can essentially misspell my name and still get to my website?  Actually … that’s probably a good idea.  But the point is, should anyone wish to find me through the internet, their chances of doing so are Extremely High, but only if they spell my name correctly.

Alternately, they could search for “zornog” and effectively find me.

… In other words, I’m doomed.