1st on Google – Week 29

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 29th 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, 28th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 8-12-12 (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  (no change from last week at #22)
• #40- My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (down 2 places from last week at #38)
• #41 – My profile on Quora (up 3 places from last week at #44)
• #43 – @bookwormlaser on Twitter (up 2 places from last week at #45)

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #2 and a total of 7 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:

• #2 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #2)
• #16 – My profile on Quora (down 2 places from last week at #18)
• #18 – @AlanReeves on Twitter (down 1 place from last week at #19)
• #62 – My About page on Quora (down 6 places from last week at #56)
• #67 – This website, BlueCapra (down 9 places from last week at #58)

Overall, I showed up 7 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 18 places.

I did manage to show up at #7 for images on Bing, and overall, had 5 in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week, my Bing Linked pages grew 3 links to 35.  Those links do not seem to be making much difference but who knows, they may pay off in the future and thus, I keep plodding on.

Also this week, I was able to comment on 4.  From what I could tell, the comments I made last week have not indexed yet (or at least, I haven’t seem them yet).  Still, there does not seem to be a better way to get your name out on the web easily and associated with a link of your choice, even if the link is a NOFOLLOW (anchor text still counts).

Social Media and Search Results – A Study

An interesting article I came across last week was from Search Engine Watch and wrote about how social media visibility affected search engine results.  The article looked at writers in the technology niche and compared how the different social media platforms showed up in the search engine results over the first 6 months of the year.  You can read the complete article here but basically, Twitter showed about a 7% increase in the 1-3 spots verses the 4-10 spots.

What that means, at least with technology writers, that Twitter is 7% more likely to give you a rank of 1-3 in search results as compared to a rank of 4-10.  That is followed by Facebook with a 2% increase, LinkedIn with no change, and Google+ with a 1% decrease.  The key is how each platform is used, but let’s hold off on that thought just a bit and look at how likely each platform is to show up on the first page.

According to the article, Twitter has a 95% chance of showing up on the first page of search results with a 4% improvement since January 2012.  LinkedIn is next with a 76% chance (up 9%), then Facebook with 62% (up 10%), and last but not least, Google+ with 36% (up 3%).  From that data, should we all switch to Twitter?

As mentioned before, it really depends on how you use each social network.  According to the article,

We found 89 percent of writers had little or no activity on Google+, while 71 percent had high activity on Twitter, suggesting the social network’s visibility for our group is closely correlated with activity.

So, at least for the group featured in the article, the more you use the platform, the more it helps you.

So, if you are a technology writer and want to build your personal brand, the data shows that while Twitter may give you the best results, Google+ is wide open for you.  For everyone else, unless Google+ shrivels and dies, it may offer the most opportunity to build your brand in a less crowded arena.

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.