BlueCapra

Using Technology To Solve Problems and Create Solutions

1st on Google – Week 13

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1st on Google - Week 13 Update - Images search for Alan Reeves result - 1stWelcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the lucky (or unlucky) 13th update if you believe in that sort of thing.  If you missed the first few posts, you can find the first one here, 12th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 04-22-12 (click here to do your own search):

  • #5 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #15)
  • #16 – The About Me page from my personal blog, BlueCapra.com, with picture (down 4 places from last week at #12)
  • #21 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (up 6 place from last week at #27)
  • #49 – BlueCapra.com tag page; posts tagged ‘Alan Reeves’ (down 11 places from last week at #38)
  • #52 – The post, How Would You Use a MeTag™? from CoachRadio.tv about one of my laser engraving products, the MeTag™ (down 2 places from last week at #50)
This week I am at #5, same as last week.  The links occupying the top 4 spots include IMDb, Wikipedia (twice), and LinkedIn, all with way high page rank.  My first occurrence is at #5 and overall, my top 5 results decreased 11 places.  I showed up 10 times in the top 100 search results which is up 1 from last week.  It does seem that the results can fluctuate a great deal week to week (sometimes referred to as the Google dance) but the same big sites are showing up time and time again.

Now for a very welcomed success; in a Google image search, my picture showed up first (the one with the baby skunk on my shoulder). In addition, #22 was a screenshot I used in the 1st Week update,  #24 is a snapshot of a video from my laser engraving series, Can You Etch It on Vimeo, and #25 was a screenshot from the 4th Week update.  My picture or some image I have created showed up at #34, #35, #36, #44, #48, #53, #58, #60, #67, #72, #74, #81, #87, #91, #93, and #99.  Overall, images associated with me showed up 20 times.  Not too shabby.  I should have started this weeks ago.  What a confidence boost.

Cornering the market – from Google to Bing

Last week, I started to check Bing in addition to Google due to the percentage of the US searches being performed on Google, Bing, and Yahoo (which is powered by Bing technology).  Here are the top 4 Bing results (there were not 5 results in the top 150):

Overall, I showed up 5 times in the top 100 search results on Bing.  I tried another image search but did not see myself in the first 100 or so results.  My first occurrence was at #6 (compared with Google at #5) and my top 4 results decreased 92 place, much more when you consider the I could only find 4 results in the top 150.

Strategies for 1st

This week was quiet with only a few blog comments going out.  I published five posts like I do nearly every week (two here at BlueCapra.com and three at BookWormLaser.com), including a video every Friday.  I share the posts on Facebook, Google+, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg, and sometimes on Twitter.  The videos are uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion (a new site I am trying).  I can see that there is more volume of links associating my name with my information and content, especially when DailyMotion showed up as #99 on Google.  Overall, I have over 25 different links to my content go out every week that I generate.  That is not much, but each of those five posts have a link with the anchor text “Alan Reeves” and many of the other links and videos have “Alan Reeves” as one of the tags.  It’s only a matter of time until I hit 1st.

New Strategy – Link to deep pages

One tip I picked up on this week was from Neil Patel of QuickSprout.  He recommended not putting a link to your home page when commenting on posts but to put a link to a deep page that is relevant to the comment or post you are commenting about.  Until now, all of my links have been back to my home page but I really like his idea.  From a user perspective, if you really liked a comment someone left and wanted to read some of their work, would you rather go to the home page or a post/page the author thinks is the most relevant to the comment?  Simple idea, interesting possibilities.

Summary – The search for Alan Reeves

I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress so far, going from #93 on 1-25-12 to #3 on 3-11-12 even though I have slipped to #5. I have learned a lot about improving search ranking and I have made a lot of mistakes, but this is a learning process.  I hope to make significant progress by next week and regain my past progress.  Stay tuned to see if next week is the week I reach the 1st spot on Google and Bing.  If you have any suggestions to get me there, leave a comment and let me know.

Check out next week’s update – Week 14

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