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The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google – Week 60

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The Search for Alan Reeves - 1st on Google - Week 60 - BlueCapra.com rich snippet resultWelcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 60th 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, 59th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 3-17-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

This week I’m at #9. Overall, my top 5 results increased 31 places with 2 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places.  As a whole, I showed up 8 times in the top 100 search results.


A check at Google Images showed my picture at #6 and a total of 10 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:

This week I’m at #3 on Bing.  Overall, my top 5 results decreased 16 places with 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places.  As a whole, I showed up 9 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Bing Images showed my picture at #8 and a total of 4 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week I did a little tweaking to this website, adding some microdata tags.  Microdata is a set of labels and tags that are specified under HTML5.  These labels describe specific types of information such as reviews, products, names, birthdays, etc. Within a webpage, until microdata came around, there was no way to specifically identify text as a name.  Now, we can.

And here is where a little coding experience comes in: after looking at the structure of the tags on Google’s site and Schema.org, there were several places where microdata tags could be implemented into my WordPress theme.  It took a little coding but I think with a little help anyone would be able to do the same with their theme.  In a future post, I’ll get into the specifics of the changes that were made.

To see what microdata is showing up on your site, head over to Google’s Rich Snippet Tool.  Put in your homepage and see what Google finds for your microdata or structured data.  For this site, I found that my posts were missing these tags: entry-title, updated, and author.  By adding a little bit of code into my loop.php file, several tags were taken care of.

As a result (maybe a coincidence ..) my picture showed up beside one of the search results in Bing.  There was also a pretty big surge in my Google results but that could have been the normal ups and downs of the search results.  There are also other benefits such as Google understanding who the author of the post, when it was updated, what type of content it is, etc.  This may not seem like much but if you have ever performed a search and noticed some extra information below some of the links (such as show times for movies, reviews, etc), you may have witnessed microdata first hand.  It may not do much for search results but every little bit counts, right?

Summary – The search for Alan Reeves

I’ve been able to make good progress since the start, going from #91 on 1-25-12 to #2 on 2-26-12 and to #9 today. I have learned a lot about improving search ranking and I have made a lot of mistakes, but it’s a learning process. 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.

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