The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 51st 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, 50th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 1-13-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#10 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, no picture – see why in the strategies section (up 1 place from last week at #10)
#27 – My profile at Brand Yourself (down 4 places from last week at #23)
#32 – My videos on Vimeo (up 1 place from last week at #33)
#33 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (down 2 places last week at #36)
#55 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Google+ – Old profile that will soon be deleted (down 18 places from last week at #37)

This week I’m at #10. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 22 places with 1 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 10 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #9 and a total of 9 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)
#11 – My Facebook profile (no change from last week at #11)
#13 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (up 1 place from last week at #14)
#25 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Google+ – soon to be deleted (up 4 places from last week at #29)
#29 – My profile on Quora (up 3 places from last week at #32)

This week I’m at #3 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results increased 8 place with 4 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 6 times in the top 100 search results.

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

Strategies for 1st

This week I only commented on a few posts but I did find something interesting about Google Authorship. You may remember, back on week 1, week 15, or week 20, one of the benefits of claiming Google Authorship is having your Google+ picture show up next to your links in the search results. The experts… you know… “they”… say having your picture by a link increases the click-through rate. But how do you set things up?

It is easy to setup your Google Authorship, it only takes two steps:

Link the page to your Google+ profile and include the author markup
Add that page to the Contributs to section of your Google+ profile

Once you do those two steps, check the result in the Google Rich Snippet Tool and make sure your picture shows up. It takes a week or two for Google to start using your picture in the results.

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 #10 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.