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1st on Google – Week 30

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1st on Google - The Search for Alan Reeves - Week 30Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 30th 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, 29th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 8-19-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

This week I’m at #4, dropping a place from last week at #3.  The first occurrence of a link that is pointing to one of my sites is #23.  Overall, my top 5 results increased 32 places with 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places, up from last week.  As a whole, I showed up 10 times in the top 100 search results.


A check at Google Images showed my picture at #4 and a total of 4 occurrences in the top 100 images with one more just missing out at #101.

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:

  • #4 – My LinkedIn profile (down 2 places from last week at #2)
  • #12 – My profile on Quora (up 4 places from last week at #16)
  • #17 – @AlanReeves on Twitter (up 1 place from last week at #18)
  • #38 – My answers on Quora (up 24 places from last week at #62)
  • #56 – My Google+ profile (up 11 places from last week at #67)

Overall, I showed up 7 times in the top 100 search results on Bing.  My first occurrence was at #4 (compared with Google at #4) and overall, my results increased 38 places.

I did manage to show up at #2 for images on Bing, and overall, had 5 in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week I found a few more pages to add to my Bing Linked pages, bringing the total to 37.  It wasn’t much, but I’ll take any progress I can get.

To generate more backlinks, I was able to find 4 blog posts to comment on.  A few were for this site and a few were for Book Worm Laser & Design.  This is going to continue to be a strategy to focus on long term.  I have been trying to focus on the sites that have actually sent traffic via those backlinks but I only comment where I can add value to the discussion.

In an effort to help my on page SEO, I went through each page in this series and updated the link and page titles to include my name.  I made sure that each page had a META description and that there was a common theme throughout the series.  It seems to have helped; one of the links in the top 100 on Google was to a previous update.  If you want to update your posts with META descriptions and titles and use a ton other great features, check out WordPress SEO by Yoast, my plugin of choice for this task.

Summary – The search for Alan Reeves

I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress these past many weeks, going from #91 on 1-25-12 to #3 on 3-11-12 and to #4 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.

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