The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 65th 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, 64th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 4-21-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#15 – My About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (no change from last week at #13)
#16 – Week 61 in this series (up 11 places from last week at #27)
#30 – My videos on Vimeo (up 18 places from last week at #48)
#46 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (up 3 places from last week at #49)
#59 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (up 3 places from last week at #62)

This week I’m at #12. Overall, my top 5 results increased 35 places with 1 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 7 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #12 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 with picture (no change from last week at #2)
#11 – My Facebook profile (no change from last week at #11)
#15 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves with picture (down 1 place from last week at #14)
#22 – My profile on 48Days.net (up 1 place from last week at #23)
#29 – My profile on About.Me (down 1 place from last week at #28)

This week I’m at #2 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 1 place with 4 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 Bing Images showed my picture at #10 and a total of 4 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week I tried to answer several questions in Quora. Haven’t seen the benefit but this is a marathon, not a sprint (at least, that is what I keep telling myself…).

These last few weeks I have tried to get more involved in social media. I’ve tried to interact with people on Google+. This is also the second week I have tried to be more consistent with Twitter for my personal account. I’m using Buffer and frankly, don’t see how anyone can be consistent without it. According to my analytics, it has been a total bust with no inbound traffic so we’ll have to see how things go with it.

It seems that there has been a small algorithm change at Google that pushed up exact match domains to the top. I started to suspect something a week or so ago but this week, when the top result on Google and Bing were the same.

The top result is a simple website with an exact match domain but has few pages. Seems to be relevant but I am still surprised it ranks so high with so little content. Oh well, something to learn from.

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 #15 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.