The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 61st 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, 60th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 3-24-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#11 – My About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (down 2 places from last week at #9)
#30 – My videos on Vimeo (down 20 places from last week at #10)
#54 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (down 16 places from last week at #38)
#61 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (down 5 places from last week at #56)
#73 – The Search For Alan Reeves – 1st on Google – Week 57 (down 16 places from last week at #57)

This week I’m at #11. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 59 places (HOLY plumiting results Batman…) with 1 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 11 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #15 and a total of 5 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)
#8 – My Facebook profile (up 5 places from last week at #13)
#14 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (up 11 places from last week at #25)
#20 – Alan Reeves on BrandYourself (up 6 places from last week at #26)
#23 – My profile on 48Days.net (up 8 places from last week at #31)

This week I’m at #3 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results increased 30 places with 5 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 Bing Images showed my picture at #6 and a total of 6 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week, I decided to expand my horizons and checked out Be #1 on Google by Jon Smith (aff link). It talks about 52 strategies that will help your SEO efforts. Being several years old (and pre-Panda and other updates) the strategies were not as relevant as they could be but overall, it was an OK book. If you are new to SEO, this book will give you several good strategies. If you have a little SEO experience under your belt, you are most likely doing all the strategies already.

One of the strategies the book suggested was to add keywords via a meta tag. I have not done this until now because all I have read says that it doesn’t matter and is not tracked by the search engines. It can’t hurt so if even one very obscure search engine is looking for some meta keywords, I’m setup.

Looking at the results from this week, I am a bit disappointed at the plumitting results. Bing is looking pretty good but Google is not showing me any love. One strange thing I have been noticing are the duplicate results. In the past, I have found the same link at #10 and #11 for example. Often, it happens as the last result on one page and the first results on the next. Google does the double result thing every few weeks or so but this week was the first I saw it on Bing (and I saw it twice this week). Strange….

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 #11 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.