The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 63rd 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, 62nd Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 4-7-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#13 – My About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (down 1 place from last week at #12)
#23 – My videos on Vimeo (up 4 places from last week at #27)
#36 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (down 8 places from last week at #28)
#59 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (down 13 places from last week at #46)
#61 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (down 1 place from last week at #60)

This week I’m at #12. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 19 places with 2 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 #7 and a total of 6 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 with picture (no change from last week at #2)
#11 – My Facebook profile (down 3 places from last week at #8)
#14 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves with picture (no change from last week at #14)
#23 – My profile on 48Days.net (no change from last week at #23)
#27 – My profile on About.Me (up 1 place from last week at #28)

This week I’m at #2 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 2 places with 4 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 Bing Images showed my picture at #11 and a total of 8 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

It seems that this week, the 1st spot on Google changed. For weeks, as far as I can remember, the top spot has either been LinkedIn, Wikipedia, IMDb, or some other enormous site. This week, that coveted first spot was taken by a small-ish site with an exact match domain. There are two exact match domains on the first page (one with a hyphen, one without). The next exact match domain is at #22. What does that mean?

That means hope… I have toiled for months and months, not sure if I would ever overtake the larger sites but dedicated to giving it a go. This week was the first time that I can remember that a small site has shown up first. GREAT!!!! If that site can do it, so can I. That may require me to break down and purchase the .com for my name but it is possible.

For those interested in tagging pages, you can now tag pages within Klout. On Bing, I have 237 tagged pages and within Klout, I am up to 53 already. Not sure if they are doing any good but again, it can’t hurt.

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 #13 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.