BlueCapra

Using Technology To Solve Problems and Create Solutions

1st on Google – Week 26 – A look at the last 6 months

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Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 26th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves.  If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 25th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 7-22-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

  • #3  – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #3)
  • #32 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture  (down 4 placess from last week at #32)
  • #33 – This website, BlueCapra.com, with picture (up 6 places from last week at #39)
  • #40 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (no change from last week at #40)
  • #44 – @bookwormlaser on Twitter (down 1 place from last week at #43)
This week I’m at #3.  The first occurrence of a link that is pointing to one of my sites is #32.  Overall, my top 5 results increased 1 place with 1 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places.  As a whole, I showed up 12 times in the top 100 search results.  Not a record, but good all the same.

Image Search

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #3 and a total of 4 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Cornering the market – from Google to Bing

In addition to searching Google, I have been checking Bing results for my name, Alan Reeves (click here to do your own Bing search for Alan Reeves).  Here are the top 5 Bing results:

  • #2 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #2)
  • #15 – My profile on Quora (down 1 place from last week at #16)
  • #23 – @AlanReeves on Twitter (down 5 places from last week at #18)
  • #31 – The About page on BlueCapra.com  (up 40 places from last week at #69)
  • #33 – The About page on BlueCapra.com – older link (up 48 places from last week at #79)

Overall, I showed up 8 times in the top 100 search results on Bing.  My first occurrence was at #2 (compared with Google at #3) and overall, my results increased 82 places.

I did manage to show up at #3 for images on Bing, and overall, had 4 in the top 100 images.

Understanding the results

This week marks the 6 month mark for my journey.  In that time, I have gone from #91 to #3 on Google.  On Bing, I show up at the #2 spot.  I am happy with the progress but disappointed that the journey is not over.  All things take time and this, apparently, will take a little longer.

A look back at the links over the previous 26 weeks, and a little spreadsheet work, shows which links have shown up when and how often.  Here are some of the numbers for Google:

These results surprised me.  I know that my LinkedIn profile showed up regularly but I had no idea that next in line would be my About page.  Also, Vimeo showing up 16 times is encouraging, especially since I only started using it in March.

Here are some of the numbers for Bing:

I would like to have thought about collecting the results from Bing at the same time as I did from Google but alas, it is not meant to be.  These numbers are all that I have, starting on 4/15/12.  It is interesting that Twitter has the most occurrences in Bing when it only showed up 8 times in the Google results.  My Quora feed and profile showed up 13 times on Bing and only 1 time on Google.  It was nice to see that both the home page of this site and the About page showed up in the top 5 results on both search engines.  Progress is a great thing.

For those of you that are interested, here are a few graphs that show the data:

Strategies for 1st

This week I am trying a few new ideas.  I began uploading some images from my business, Book Worm Laser & Design, to Flickr.  With that strategy, I am trying to get my products, images, and videos online at another domain.  With YouTube and other video sharing sites, the links entered into the description can be clicked on and followed to your site.  Apparently on Flickr, they can’t (or I don’t know how to do that yet).  More links would be nice, but more exposure is a good thing as well.

I also added several more linked pages in Bing bringing the total to 20.  I haven’t noticed those links helping that much but this week, I had an increase in occurrences in the top 100 on Bing compared to last week.  Causation or causality?  Hard to tell, but any little bit helps.

One of the sources of information I am using has been Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.  For months, I have been tracking the following data (all for the previous rolling 30 days):

  • Number of unique visitors
  • Total page views
  • Page views per visitor
  • Inbound links
  • Bounce rate

During the time I have been on this journey, I have seen my number of unique visitors (for both this site and my business site) increase from 484 to 776 (60% increase) and my inbound links grow from 414 to 1519 (267% increase).  Part of these results have been from other activities but regardless of the activities, the goal is the same; get more traffic to my web properties.  Both sites have increased their inbound links by over 500 links in 6 months.  That may not be much to everyone, but it is pretty amazing to me.

Using these numbers and the data that form them, we can start to see some strategies.  For example, this site has 78 domains linking to it (according to Google Analytics) resulting in 844 inbound links.  Those links have the anchor text:

  • alan reeves
  • curiosity & learning
  • about alan reeves
  • contact me
  • home

From that data, I can see that I am doing a good job linking this site to my name.  I may be doing it too much, but it’s hard to tell.  I can also see what domains are linking to me and how often.  This is a good way to understand what sites are being indexed and how your links (most often in the form of blog comments for me) are being indexed by Google.

For example, let’s say you are commenting on 5 different blogs 2 times a week each, resulting in 10 possible inbound links.  Some are older posts, some are new posts.  After a few weeks, you can look in Google Webmaster tools to see what sites are linking to you.  Of those 5 blogs, maybe only 2 show up with any links.  After a few more weeks, those same 2 blogs are the only ones that show up, each with an increasing number of links.  With that information, you can begin to form a strategy around what blogs to focus your efforts on.  If you are trying to increase your inbound links, you need to be focusing on the sites that Google says are linking to you.  That is an overly simplistic strategy, but I hope you can see the possibilities and importance of tracking your results.

Summary – The search for Alan Reeves

I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress these past 6 months, going from #91 on 1-25-12 to #3 on 3-11-12 and to #3 today. 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 27

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