Would you like to be ranked 1st on Google? I would. Not necessarily with my business or personal blog, but when someone searched my name, Alan Reeves, I want to be ranked 1st, maybe not on all the search engines, but at least at Google. Narcissistic, maybe, but from a business and marketing standpoint, who would not want to be #1 on Google for something. But how can I do such a thing?
I am no SEO expert, but I am willing to learn. I now have a (very specific) goal and I am just curious enough to see how long it will take me. First, I need to determine where I am.
Google is great at incorporating other services into their search. When I am logged in under my GMail account, my likes, friends, and posts are taken into account when Google returns the search results. Since I am trying to show up 1st to a complete stranger, that nice feature makes it a bit more difficult to test. To get around that feature, I could either log out of my account or do my searching on a completely separate computer. I decided not to log out and do my searching on other computers and devices, including public computers when available, such as at the library. Now that I have that squared away, I need to figure out where I am starting from.
Where do I compare to that 1st spot
As of January 25, 2012, I show up #91 with my About page at my personal website, BlueCapra.com. That is a long way from the 1st spot, so I have my work cut out for me. As an interesting side note, my Google+ picture shows up beside the link to my blog. If you want to know how I did this, you can walk through the steps yourself on this post by Amit Agarwal on Digital Inspirations. I also show up at the following places (to round out the top 5):
#93 – A book review I left on BookSneeze
#98 – My author page at EzineArticles.com – I wrote an article about laser engraving glass
#99 – A comment I left at 48Days.com
#101 – my Google+ profile (displayed with picture)
My restriction
The link has to be obvious to me and not a link to a page that might contain a link to a page. For example, I did not even go to any site that said there were 25 people named Alan Reeves on whatever website. I wanted to only count the links that directed traffic to a page with my content or information.
My Google search settings on the computer where I performed this initial search is as follows
Google Instant Predictions – OFF (easier to display a longer list of results)
SafeSearch Filters – Strict
Results per page – 100
I also cleared my cache, cookies, history, whatever I could so I could get as accurate of results as I could
Search results vary from day-to-day so I will be doing an official search twice a week and sharing the results. I will share the steps I take, including links, once a week. There are a few more things I can tweak on my business site, Book Worm Laser & Design and I will share those as well. I hope my journey to ranking 1st on Google helps you with your own SEO. Stay tuned.
(photo by: sheelamohan)
