Personal SEO – Getting to 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 82nd update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves. If you missed any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 81st Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 8-18-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#1 – My Vizify profile – (no change from last week at #1)
#3 – My Blogger page (no change from last week at #3)
#4 – Alan Reeves on GoodReads (no change from last week at #4)
#13 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (no change from last week at #13)
#16 – My About page on BlueCapra (up 1 place from last week at #17)

This week I’m still at #1. Overall, my top 5 results increased 1 places with 5 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 14 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:

#5 – My LinkedIn profile with picture (no change from last week at #5)
#14 – My profile on 48Days.NET (no change from last week at #14)
#17 – Alan Reeves on About.Me (up 1 place from last week at #18)
#18 – My BrandYourself profile (up 3 places from last week at #22)
#26 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (up 15 places from last week at #41)

This week I’m at #5 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results increased 19 place with 4 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.

A check at Bing Images showed my picture at #7 and a total of 6 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week was a slow week, adding a few blog comments and a few posts to the list. The most interesting thing happened when I took a look at all my back links on Google Webmaster tools. It seems that Dribbble is not only a great place to see great designers but a good place for back links.

Also, I’ve been looking into schema markups for content. You can read more about them at schema.org but on a broad level, the schema markup lets Google, Bing, Pinterest, and a bunch of other sites and search engines understand your website better. For example, if your name is listed as the author of a post, Google doesn’t attribute your name as the author (unless you have setup Google Authorship but that is a different topic all together). With the schema markup, you can identify yourself as the author (or specifically, the text of your name as your name) and a wide variety of other values.

This can be very important when you do reviews (ratings can be marked up), schedules, local businesses, and much more. The key to on-page SEO is to get search engines to understand content better. Using schema markup is a great way to help the process. It doesn’t look too difficult to implement but it will take a bit of programming.

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 #1 on 7-14-13 and to #1 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 I can hold on to the 1st spot on Google and and reach 1st on 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.