Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 20th update. If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 19th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 06-10-12 (click here to do your own search):
- #4 – My LinkedIn profile (up 1 place from last week at #5)
- #13 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (up 2 places from last week at #15)
- #33 – My BrandYourself.com profile (down 3 places from last week at #30)
- #34 – @bookwormlaser on Twitter (down 3 places from last week at #31)
- #42 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (down 10 place from last week at #32)
Image Search
A check at Google Images showed my picture at #6 and a total of 14 occurrences in the top 100 images, down from last week at #2 but up from 11 occurrences.
Cornering the market – from Google to Bing
Last week, I started to check Bing in addition to Google due to the percentage of the US searches being performed on Google, Bing, and Yahoo (which is powered by Bing technology). Here are the top 5 Bing results:
- #2 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #2)
- #17 – @alanreeves on Twitter (up 6 places from last week at #23)
- #19 – The About page on BlueCapra.com (up 7 places from last week at #26)
- #28 – My profile on Quora (up 12 place from last week at #40)
- #32 – The About page on BlueCapra.com (older link)
Overall, I showed up 6 times in the top 100 search results on Bing, an increase from the past few weeks. My first occurrence was at #2 (compared with Google at #4) and my results increased 25 spots. The site that is occupying the #1 spot has an exact match domain which is difficult to overcome.
I did manage to rank 3rd and 5th for images on Bing, and overall, had 4 images in the top 100 images..
Strategies for 1st
This week was an improvement from the past few weeks, including a increase in my Google ranking. It is hard to say exactly what is working the best, but I believe that it is a combination of everything I am doing. The images from this series has been showing up in the Google ranking very often. The great part is that all of those images are links back to the pages where they are found.
One tip I picked up and implemented this week was idea #2 from a BrandYourself post, How to Show Up at the Top of Google for Your Name: Put your name in key places throughout the site. They suggest writing an authors bio in the third-person and including your name in you About link. Prior to reading this, my about page anchor text was just About and as you can see to the right, it now has About Alan Reeves. Another small change but one that makes a lot of sense.
I also read a post from Yoast.com, Push rel=”author” through your head. He talks about Google now allowing you to put the rel=”Author” tag in the heading of your pages via a Link tag, taking advantage of authorship and if you have it setup correctly, showing your Google+ profile picture in all search results featuring your content. Yoast is working to incorporate that tag into his unbelievable great WordPress plugin, WordPress SEO. If you don’t have it, I would suggest installing it ASAP. I plan to do a how-to on the plugin very soon. I use it on every post I publish.
Summary – The search for Alan Reeves
I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress so far, going from #91 on 1-25-12 to #3 on 3-11-12 even though I have slipped to #4. 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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