The Search for Alan Reeves - 1st on Google - Week 47

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 47th 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, 46th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 12-16-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#10 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (up 3 places from last week at #13)
#18 – My profile at Brand Yourself (up 3 places from last week at #15)
#34 – My LinkedIn profile (down 3 places from last week at #31)
#39 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (down 2 places from last week at #37)
#45 – The tag page for Alan Reeves on BlueCapra (down 7 places from last week at #38)

This week I’m at #10 but more specifically, this site is at #10. If memory serves, this is a new record for BlueCapra. Very happy. Very happy indeed. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 6 place with 2 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 10 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #7 and a total of 11 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 Twitter handle (up 4 places from last week at #19)
#24 – My profile on Quora (down 2 places from last week at #22)
#37 – The about page for my profile on Quora (down 13 places from last week at #24)
#42 – The Google+ profile for Book Worm Laser & Design (down 8 places from last week at #34)

This week I’m at #4 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results decreased more than 19 place with 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 7 times in the top 100 search results.

I did manage to show up at #4 for images on Bing, and overall, had 1 in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week I did a little digging for techniques and found a very interesting series by John Saddington over at TentBlogger. The series is titled The Blogger’s Essential Guide to SEO. So far I am about half way through the over 40 posts. So far, here are the ideas that I am implementing:

For a while now, I have tried to optimize my post slugs (direct permalink or URL of the post), keeping them readable for people. After reading #14 and some other research, I realize that I had not been optimizing them enough. So, in an effort to increase the keyword density of my post plus a few other benefits, I have changed the way my slugs are formatted. You can see the difference by comparing the slug of this post to the slug of last week’s post.

Also, I have been trying to fix all of my 404 errors and broken links on both this site and my business site. The WordPress plugin I am using is the Broken Link Checker. This plugin does a good job of identifying broken links throughout the site and provides the URL, the error types, link text, and the page where the link is broken. You can choose to fix the link right there in the Administration panel or head to the page and see what is going on. So far a good tood since it has found over 20 broken links on this site alone. I have some work to do…

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 #10 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 only had time to do 1 thing to help your site or name rank better in Google, what would it be? Leave me a comment and let me know.