Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 57th 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, 56th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 2-24-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):
- #8 – The tag page for Alan Reeves on BlueCapra.com, with picture (down 1 place from last week at #7)
- #11 – My videos on Vimeo (up 13 places from last week at #24)
- #31 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (up 8 places from last week at #40)
- #49 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (up 2 places from last week at #51)
- #52 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (up 14 places from last week at #66)
A check at Google Images showed my picture at #3 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)
- #12 – My Facebook profile (no change from last week at #12)
- #14 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (no change from last week at #14)
- #26 – My profile on BrandYourself (up 8 places from last week at #34)
- #32 – My Quora profile (up 18 places from last week at #50)
This week I’m at #2 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results increased 26 places 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.
A check at Bing Images showed my picture at #3 and a total of 5 occurrences in the top 100 images.
Strategies for 1st
This week I tried to go through The Advanced Guide to SEO by Neil Patel a little more and apply what I found. In Chapter 3, Neil mentioned a site called Freebase. From what I could tell, it is a free directory listing of sites organized under different keywords (similar to DMOZ.org). It is one of the places Google uses to gather its information from.
Freebase
Setting up an account was easy and adding both this site and my business, Book Worm Laser & Design, was pretty easy. This was much easier (or at least, faster) than DMOZ.org because Freebase is user moderated like a wiki. Anyone can go to any listing and update the information. With DMOZ.org, you submit your info and wait… and wait…. and wait…. for your listing to appear. After several months, if your listing has not appeared, you are left to assume that there was a problem with your listing and you should try again (or give up). Normally, people try another category. Personally, I like the idea of Freebase better.
Another bit of goodness from The Advanced Guide to SEO was a run down of the setting for the SEO plugin I use, WordPress SEO by Yoast. There were 5 or so settings that I changed under the guidance of Neil’s guide, including a selection to noindex media files.
Category descriptions
While I was tweaking the site, Neil also suggested adding good descriptions to your Category listings. About half of my categories had descriptions so I went ahead and fixed the rest.
Javascript date wrapping
One of the more interesting things that Neil mentioned was wrapping your date in Javascript. This allowed users to see the date (because most browsers are setup to display Javascript) but Google will not. Why would someone do this you may ask? Well, if your content is evergreen or at least, not all that time sensitive, it’s better to omit the date because newer content often has more relevance in Google. So, even if you wrote an amazing, wonderful, earth-shattering post a year ago, it will not have the same klout as one that was written yesterday.
Wrapping the date in Javascript take a little modification to your code but it is very easy. I’m using the Standard theme by 8Bit and only had to make the change in one spot. The guide recommends looking in several places in your theme and explains how to easily do the searching. This may be just the opportunity to get your hands dirty in a little code if you are new to this kind of stuff.
Summary – The search for Alan Reeves
I’ve been able to make good progress since the start, going from #91 on 1-25-12 to #2 on 2-26-12 and to #7 today. I have learned a lot about improving search ranking and I have made a lot of mistakes, but it’s a learning process. 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.
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