The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 49th 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, 48th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 12-30-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#11 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (down 1 place from last week at #10)
#15 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (no change from last week at #15)
#25 – My profile at Brand Yourself (up 8 places from last week at #33)
#36 – My LinkedIn profile (up 5 places from last week at #41)
#40 – My profile page on 48 Days.net (up 4 places from last week at #44)

This week I’m at #11. What a difference a few hours makes. Just about 6 hours ago, I was showing my nephew some results and my About page was at #10 (now at #15). Overall, my top 5 results increased 16 places with 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 12 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:

#3 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #3)
#12 – My Facebook profile (up 3 places from last week at #15)
#18 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (up 2 places from last week at #20)
#26 – My profile at Brand Yourself (down 4 places from last week at #22)
#33 – My profile on Quora (down 10 places from last week at #23)

This week I’m at #3 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 9 place with 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 9 times in the top 100 search results.

I did manage to show up at #4 for images on Bing, and overall, had 3 in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week I was able to comment on a few posts. I’m in the process of converting this site over to the Standard theme, making sure all my SEO markup and stuff is correct. On top of that, I am trying to simply my Google+ profiles and pages. Currently, I am moving my personal Google+ profile to a new one (more aligned with my Google accounts) and moving all of my business interactions to my business page, deleting my business profile.

My hope is that this will help my SEO result in the coming weeks. Making sure all of my various profiles are correct and interacting with each other properly is proving to be a bit tricky but I’ll get there.

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 #11 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.