Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 18th update. If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 17th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 05-27-12 (click here to do your own search):
- #5 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #5)
- #15 – My personal blog, BlueCapra.com, with picture!!! (no change from last week at #15)
- #29 – My Pinterest profile for Book Worm Laser & Design (no change from last week at #29)
- #30 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (up 2 place from last week at #32)
- #32 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture!!! (up 2 places from last week at #34)
Image Search
A check at Google Images showed my picture at #1 and a total of 12 occurrences in the top 100 images, which is a new record for the number of occurrences. I am hoping that the image results is helping along this journey but it is difficult to tell. If nothing else, the images represent more possible targets for search results so they can’t be that bad.
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 5 Bing results:
- #2 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #2)
- #22 – @alanreeves on Twitter (no change places from last week at #22)
- #25 – The About page on BlueCapra.com (no change from last week at #25)
- #33 – My personal blog, BlueCapra.com (no changefrom last week at #33)
- #41 – My profile on Quora (down 1 place from last week at #40)
PageRank Increase
One tidbit of new information I happened upon (via a Chrome extension called PageRank Status) was an increase to my PageRank for this site. All new sites start at 0 and the goal, although unattainable for most, is 10. As of early last week, my PageRank had increased to a 1. Now, I know that PageRank is only a small part of Google’s search algorithm but it is nice to see progress. On the same note, my Alexa ranking is in the 5,500,000 range. Basically, I am hovering around the 5 million mark in website traffic. Pretty good when you consider how many sites are out there and that my business site, Book Worm Laser & Design, is around the 25 million mark. All this information points to slow but positive progress.
Strategies for 1st
This week was another bad one for the journey as I was only able to comment on a few posts. On top of that, the post that was suppose to come out on last Thursday did not make it so I only published 4 posts and 1 video last week.
I did start to listen to Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio from Copyblogger. To be ever more efficient, I am listening to them at a faster than normal speed that makes everyone sound like chipmunks while still being able to retain most of the content. One of the things that I was reminded about was the importance of having a focused theme and voice. If your site is about fitness and you are commenting on random sites, hoping to get a link back, Google does not look at those links with the same favor as links from sites closer to your subject. You would get better results if you commented on another fitness site, healthy living site, etc.
Basically, Google is trying to mimic human search as close as possible. Having relevant links is the key. A link from a fitness site to your fitness site is better than a link from a shopping site to your fitness site. It makes sense but sometimes we are so blind to the desire to get any links that we disregard that those links need to be quality links. This is one of my goals for the coming weeks, to begin to narrow my writing focus on the site as well as finding other sites to comment on and learn from.
Summary – The search for Alan Reeves
I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress so far, going from #91 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.
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