The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

1st on Google - The Search for Alan Reeves - Week 42 - Knowem list Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 42nd 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, 41st Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Monday, 11-12-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#3 – My LinkedIn profile (up 1 place from last week at #4)
#18 – My profile at Brand Yourself (up 1 place from last week at #19)
#28 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (down 1 place from last week at #27)
#33 – Book Worm Laser & Design videos on Daily Motion (down 4 places from last week at #29)
#34 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (down 4 places from last week at #30)

This week I’m at #3. The first occurrence of a link that is pointing to one of my sites is #28. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 7 place with 2 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 #5 and a total of 8 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:

#4 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #4)
#20 – My profile on Quora (up 1 place from last week at #21)
#27 – Google+ profile for Book Worm Laser & Design (up 3 places from last week at #30)
#30 – My About page on Quora (up 1 place from last week at #31)
#98 – This site, BlueCapra.com (not ranked last week)

This week I’m at #4 on Bing. The first occurrence of a link that is pointing to one of my sites is #98. Overall, my top 5 results increased 5 place with 2 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 5 times in the top 100 search results.

I did manage to show up at #2 for images on Bing, and overall, had 6 in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week is much the same as last week, very little change. I did get a chance to complete 8 additional website profiles with AlanReeves as the username by using knowem. If you haven’t visited knowem.com, I highly recommend it. For free, you can do a quick search of the most popular Social Media sites for a user name you enter. For a fee, they will complete a bunch for you which will save a ton of time (and time is money, right???). I decided to do them manually since there were only 8 and I wanted to do basically the same thing for my business, Book Worm Laser & Design.

Do you know knowem?

If you haven’t decided to head over to knowem.com and signup for a bunch of sites, this next bit of advice may help. Consider each profile a link back to your site. The sites I signed up for are mostly a place holder and backlinks. For each account, I completed the minimum info needed but I made sure to add my websites to the profile. Each of those 8 additional profiles are now unique domains where I now have new backlinks.

If you have been reading for a while, you may remember me discussing what NOFOLLOW and FOLLOW links are (if you missed that post, click here read the Week 4 update). FOLLOW links are prefered over NOFOLLOW. The great thing about all of those additional Social Media sites that I signed up for is their links are FOLLOW links (at least the ones I saw). Imagine what you could do if you did the leg work and signed up for 500 other sites like that. Now imagine what would happen if you added your blog RSS feed to some of those profiles… backlinks galore…

Check out the PageRank of THAT site…

One of the benefits of backlinks and increased authority of your sites is an increase in PageRank, one of the ranking metrics used by Google (their original one, now one of about 200 metrics used to deliver search results). This site now has a PageRank of 2 (according to the SEO Toolbar) and my business site, Book Worm Laser & Design has a PageRank of 1. Sure, those numbers are small but encouraging.

Also, according to the SEO Toolbar, my Alexa Traffic Rank is 4,767,496 which means that this blog has more traffic than all but 4,767,496 other domains out there, according to Alexa. That may not sound very interesting except when you consider some other Alexa Traffic rank numbers:

3,146,359 (that’s a surprise…) – Book Worm Laser & Design (bookwormlaser.com)
68 – CNN (cnn.com)
312 – AT&T (att.com)
2 – Google (google.com)
16,401 – Knowem (knowem.com)

Soon after I started my business site (Book Worm Laser & Design), my Alexa Traffic Rank was over 20 million. Months ago, this site was in the 12 million range. Both are still far, far behind some world class sites but hey, I’m happy with the results thus far.

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 #3 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.