If you do put your name on your own blog or personal website, not only have friends link to it, but if you can get links from .edu or .gov websites that will generally increase the pagerank or importance.

Also post comments on newspaper sites that are well indexed using your real name as well as other online sites / communities that have high page ranks.

You can get the google toolbar and enable the PageRank feature if you're interested in seeing the Page Rank of different sites. There are a lot of tricks that can be used to increase page rank, but content is king, combined with inbound links from sites with high page ranks.

Speaking of .gov sites, I once saw a site that somehow - likely paid $$$ - and got their link placed on the index page of a .gov website of a ministry from some small country (no content relation between the two sites) - but I found it interesting.