The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 69th 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, 68th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 5-19-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#4 – My Pinterest profile (up 9 places from last week at #15)
#5 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (up 12 places from last week at #17)
#15 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves with picture (up 12 places from last week at #27)
#18 – This site, BlueCapra.com (up 25 place from last week at #43)
#28 – My videos on Vimeo (up 29 places from last week at #57)

This week I’m at #4. Overall, my top 5 results increased 87 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 #9 and a total of 9 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:

#5 – My Facebook profile (no change from last week at #5)
#6 – My LinkedIn profile with picture (no change from last week at #6)
#17 – This site, BlueCapra.com (up 1 place from last week at #18)
#21 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (down 1 place from last week at #20)
#23 – My BrandYourself profile (down 2 places from last week at #21)

This week I’m at #2 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 2 places with 5 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 Bing Images showed my picture at #9 and a total of 4 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week I was very surprised to see my two Pinterest profiles appear (suddenly…) at #4 and #5. I continued to work on my BrandYourself profile and registered a few social media and web 2.0 profiles. After reading a bunch of great articles from Source-Wave, I am trying to track my different profiles in an attempt to make them more effective. Until recently, all of my links when I comment have been back to either BlueCapra.com or BookWormLaser.com.

While that’s all well and good, there may be a better way. By increasing the PR of some of my profiles (by linking to them), they will pass authority to the sites they are linked to. If you choose the right profile, you can (hopefully…) increase your domain quickly.

I’m one of those I need to see it before I believe it kinda person so before I jump in, I like to experiment and see results. So, we will see how this all works in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

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 #4 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.