1st on Google - Week 19 - The search for Alan Reeves

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 19th update. If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 18th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 06-03-12 (click here to do your own search):

#5 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #5)
#15 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (no change from last week at #15)
#30 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (down 1 place from last week at #29)
#31 – My Pinterest profile for Book Worm Laser & Design (down 1 place from last week at #30)
#32 – My personal blog, BlueCapra.com, with picture (no change from last week at #32)

This week I am back at #5, same as last week. The first occurrence of a link that is pointing to one of my sites is #15. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 2 places with only 2 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. With the exception of two results, this week is pretty much the same as last week. I showed up 11 times in the top 100 search results.

Image Search

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #2 and a total of 11 occurrences in the top 100 images, down from last week at #1 and 12 occurrences.

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:

#2 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #2)
#23 – @alanreeves on Twitter (down 1 place from last week at #22)
#26 – The About page on BlueCapra.com (down 1 place from last week at #25)
#40 – My profile on Quora (down 1 place from last week at #40)

Overall, I showed up 4 times in the top 100 search results on Bing, a decrease from the past few weeks. My first occurrence was at #2 (compared with Google at #5) and my results decreased 1 spot. The site that is occupying the #1 spot has an exact match domain which is difficult to overcome.

I did manage to rank 3rd and 6th for images on Bing, so that is a plus.

Strategies for 1st

This week I happened upon an interesting feature of Bing, linked pages. This feature allows you to link your Facebook page to the search results. From what I have read, it helps your friends find you easier, much like Google using Google+ and your contacts to customize your search results that your friends have commented on or suggested. Here are a few screenshots:

I found out about the linked pages late in the week so it is hard to say if they will make any difference. So far, they have not done any good, but it has only been a few days.

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.

Check out next week’s update – Week 20