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Whether you’re applying for a new job, looking to erase the one-time angst from your high school LiveJournal, or ensuring your girlfriend never finds out about that weekend in Mexico, it’s a wise move to keep a handle on what pops up when your name is Googled.

While the art of the resume is far from dead, what exists in the virtual cloud may ultimately have more sway on your career path than what’s on paper. These days, it’s not so much about what you say about yourself as it is about what employers and potential clients can find out about you. Take these basic steps in order to ensure that what they do find is to your advantage.

Step One: Hide Your Shame

The first and obvious step to reclaiming your web presence is to nix all the bad news on you. Unless you’re a celebrity or political figure, most of the disparaging material is going to be self-inflicted. In my case, it was my younger self that was responsible for besmirching my good name. As a kid, I was kind of a humongous dork and churned out a voluminous amount of embarrassingly crappy websites and “Dear Diary, I’m a sad sack teenager” vanity blogs. More recently, there’s stuff like Facebook and MySpace to worry about.

Here’s what you gotta do:

Nuke Old Blogs. Google all your old nicknames and handles. This will quickly bring up stuff that may not be apparent when Googling your given name but may turn up with some digging. Once you find the Xanga or LiveJournal of DarkWarrior69 or something, try to log in and put your account on private or simply delete it.

Mask Your Facebook. Log in to your account and go to Settings / Privacy / Profile. Make all of the dropdown menus “Only friends.” (Especially “Photos tagged of you.”) Don’t risk allowing “Friends of Friends” access – that’s a wider network than you may realize (I’m sure Kevin Bacon’s in there somewhere).

Protect your MySpace. Log in and click My Account / Privacy. Make everything viewable by “My Friends Only.” Or better yet, just delete your MySpace account – you’ve likely outgrown it.

Purge Search Engine Caches. Many search engines save copies of websites in a cache, which means some material can linger even after deletion. In theory, search engine spiders should remove links to old content during its next update when it finds out the page has changed (or disappeared). If that’s not quick enough for you, you’ll need to use Google Webmaster Tools or Yahoo Site Explorer (though you’ll often need admin access to the site do so). You also may want to put in a removal request with the Internet Archive. For the future, use a robots.txt file. Read more on all this here.

There. That should remove the bulk of your misguided racist manifestos and and all the drunken, half-nude photos of you. With a relatively clean slate, let’s move on.

Step Two: Disambiguation

One confounding feature of the Internet is that instead of finding what you are looking for, you find what someone else is looking for. Having a white bread name like mine compounds the problem, especially if your doppelganger has a significantly bigger wig than yours (in my case, I’m contending with venture capitalists, a pool cleaner and a fairly prominent brewing company).

In order to dethrone the pretenders, you’re going to have to make it easier for your audience to find you.

Here’s how:

Read the rest of this article at Primer Magazine.