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The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google – Week 32

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Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 32nd 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, 31st Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 9-03-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

This week I’m at #3, up 1 place from last week at #4.  The first occurrence of a link that is pointing to one of my sites is #18.  Overall, my top 5 results increased 1 place with 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places.  As a whole, I showed up 13 times in the top 100 search results.  Although I only have 3 results in the top 5, my results are moving closer to #1 as a whole.


A check at Google Images showed my picture at #3 and a total of 8 occurrences in the top 100 images, an improvement over previous weeks.

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 (up 1 place from last week at #4)
  • #13 – My profile on Quora (no change from last week at #13)
  • #17 – @AlanReeves on Twitter (up 1 place from last week at #18)
  • #65 – My About page on Quora (up 1 place from last week at #66)
  • #66 – My Google+ profile (up 1 place from last week at #67)

Overall, I showed up 6 times in the top 100 search results on Bing.  My first occurrence was at #2 (compared with Google at #4) and overall, my results increased 4 places.

I did manage to show up at #3 for images on Bing, and overall, had 4 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 41.  It does seem that, instead of Linked pages, that Bing is now calling them tags but this is the first I have seen the change.  Otherwise, it was a quiet week.

Next week I plan to catch up on some video uploads to DailyMotion and Vimeo that often result in some back links.  Just for fun, I decided to search YouTube for Alan Reeves.  The channel for my business, Book Worm Laser & Design, showed up #4.  I have expected to see more video results in Google since they do own YouTube and I do upload a new video weekly, but alas, no love from Google for my videos.  I’m sure it is a keyword issue, but my name is in the description and in the tags of the video.  After a little investigation, it seems that my videos would rank higher for my name if I used my name in the title.

I did decide to change around my file structure a little after looking at the first few search results.  Occupying the #1 spot for Alan Reeves most weeks is Wikipedia and it’s article about a British football player (soccer for us Americans).  Most of the top search results have the keyword Alan Reeves showing up early in the file name and page title and/or showing up in the H1 tag.  From an SEO standpoint, those things matter to search engines.

Early on in this series, I was focusing my on page SEO toward the keywords “1st on Google“.  In the past month or so, that has changed to focusing my efforts to rank higher for “Alan Reeves”  These efforts include renaming old posts and adding 301 redirects from any old links, changing the structure of the file names and page titles, and other labor intensive.  The moral of the story is to get an idea of what you should be focusing on from the beginning.  Doing that will save you a ton of work later.

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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