Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 28th 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, 27th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 8-5-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):
- #3 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #3)
- #22 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (up 6 placess from last week at #28)
- #38 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (down 4 places from last week at #34)
- #44 – @bookwormlaser on Twitter (down 3 places from last week at #41)
- #45 – My profile on Quora (down 2 places from last week at #43)
A check at Google Images showed my picture at #2 and a total of 6 occurrences in the top 100 images.
One additional bit of triva; when doing a search for “1st on Google”, this series show up as #25, #26, #27, and #28. Each result is a different week, but I thought it would be interesting to check the results. When doing a search for “first on Google”, I don’t show up in the first 400 results or so. It’s all about the keywords.
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 (no change from last week at #2)
- #16 – My profile on Quora (up 2 places from last week at #18)
- #19 – @AlanReeves on Twitter (down 1 place from last week at #20)
- #56 – My About page on Quora (down 27 places from last week at #29)
- #58 – My About page on Quora (up 16 places from last week at #74)
Overall, I showed up 6 times in the top 100 search results on Bing. My first occurrence was at #2 (compared with Google at #3) and overall, my results decreased 10 places.
I did manage to show up at #3 for images on Bing, and overall, had 3 in the top 100 images.
Strategies for 1st
This week I found a few more linked pages on Bing bringing up my total to 32. One tip I used to find more links was to put my name in quotes. That way, Bing searched for my exact name, not just Alan or Reeves. That was a change I made several weeks ago and since then, I have doubled my linked pages. It was nice to see two of the new links pointed to my videos on Vimeo.
Also this week, I was able to comment on 7 posts from several different blogs, many of which I have not commented on before. I’m not sure when those comments will kick in to help the results, but I have not seen any show up in my Google Alerts so I can only guess that they have not been indexed yet. A quick look on Google Webmaster tools also leads me to believe they have not been indexed. No problem, it usually takes a week and a half in my experience.
Part of this whole journey to be 1st on Google is to get my content and sites to rank 1st, not just a link that has information about me. So even though I am sitting at #3 for my LinkedIn profile, I am at #22 for the About page on this site. The best rank for this site was back in May at #9. Here is a graph of the results:
Not sure if that information helps or not, but it is what it is.
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 have any suggestions to get me there, leave a comment and let me know.
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