The Search for Alan Reeves - 1st on Google - Week 52 - The first year

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 52nd 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, 51st Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 1-20-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#9 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (up 1 place from last week at #10)
#10 – My videos on Vimeo (up 17 places from last week at #27)
#25 – Alan Reeves on BrandYourself (up 7 places from last week at #32)
#41 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest with picture (down 8 places last week at #33)
#47 – The tag page for Alan Reeves on BlueCapra (up 8 places from last week at #55)

This week I’m at #10. Overall, my top 5 results increased 25 places with 2 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.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #6 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:

#2 – My LinkedIn profile (up 1 place from last week at #3)
#13 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (down 2 places from last week at #11)
#24 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Google+ – soon to be deleted (down 11 places from last week at #13)
#35 – Alan Reeves on Google+ – migrating to a new profile (down 10 places from last week at #25)
#56 – The About page for my Quora profile (down 27 places from last week at #29)

This week I’m at #3 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 49 place with 2 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 3 in the top 100 images.

A look back at the past 12 months

This weeks marks the 52nd week of my little endeavor. The first post was on 1/26/12 so technically, it hasn’t been a full year, but hey, it’s close enough; that first week was short. So, let’s get into the details.

Here is a few details from the past 12 months:

Highest rank reached on Google: #2 (2-19-12 – my LinkedIn profile)
Highest rank reached on Google by my content: #9 (5-6-12 – BlueCapra.com)
Ranked links on Google: 265

Highest rank reached on Bing: #1 (10-7-12)
Highest rank reached on Bing by my content: #16 (7-15-12 – The About page on BlueCapra.com)
Ranked links on Bing: 197

Linked pages on Bing: 71 (shown on Facebook and other sites)

In the past year, my content has gone from #91 to #9 on Google and #16 on Bing. Links pertaining to my information went from #91 to #2 and even #1 on Bing. For a little visual appeal, here are a few graphs:

Google Links

Google results by week

Notice the dip near the end; that is where my LinkedIn profile plumitted for some reason and BlueCapra jumped up in rank.

Bing Links

Bing results by week

There have been a lot of progress in the past 12 months. During this time, there have been a variety of techniques used to further the search; blog comments, social media profiles, content published, etc. Let’s take a quick look at the pie charts:

My LinkedIn profile resulted in almost 20% of the total 462 links.
This site (BlueCapra.com) resulted in almost 21% of the total links which shows the benefit of having your own platform.
The videos I created for my business, Book Worm Laser & Design, resulted in about 11% of the total links so different types of media are very useful in creating backlinks from sources you would not have access to otherwise (YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, etc)
Even though I am not much of a Twitter user, my profile resulted in 11% of the total links which shows how important the popular social media sites are to your SEO efforts.

What does all this mean for you?

If you don’t have profiles for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, and a few other big sites, you need to get them ASAP. Even if you don’t use them, be sure to at least complete the profile, adding a link back to the site of your choosing. You have the name reserved for future use and as an added bonus, a nice little back link.
Create a place you can create and share content, preferably on your own domain. It doesn’t have to be much, just somewhere to hang your digital hat
Don’t limit yourself to one mode of media; be sure to write content, create videos, create audio, etc; whatever fits your style. Branch out a little; make a bit of video or audio content if you normally write. Shake things up a bit.

Summary – The search for Alan Reeves

I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress over the past 52 weeks, going from #91 on 1-25-12 to #2 on 2-26-12 and to #9 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.