The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 70th 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, 69th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 5-26-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#4 – My Pinterest profile (no change from last week at #4)
#5 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (no change from last week at #5)
#13 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves with picture (up 2 places from last week at #15)
#17 – This site, BlueCapra.com (up 1 place from last week at #18)
#21 – My videos on Vimeo (up 7 places from last week at #28)

This week I’m at #4. Overall, my top 5 results increased 10 places with 5 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 #9 and a total of 8 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:

#4 – My LinkedIn profile with picture (up 1 place from last week at #5)
#5 – My Facebook profile (up 1 place from last week at #6)
#14 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (up 3 places from last week at #17)
#15 – This site, BlueCapra.com (up 6 places from last week at #21)
#18 – My BrandYourself profile (up 5 places from last week at #23)

This week I’m at #2 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results increased 16 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 #23 and a total of 3 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week I tried to add several more social media/web 2.0 accounts to my growing list of sites. Sites such as Weebly (a blogging platform), bigsite (a directory site), and Vizify (a graphical bio created from your data) were among the ones added. I chose these particular one from suggestions on BrandYourself.

My personal favorite is Vizify because of the interesting layout and way it displays data.

I’m also trying to be more conscious of where I link to from these profiles. For a long time, I have just been directing them to this site, my laser engraving site, and maybe Twitter or Google+ if possible. Recently, I’ve created a spreadsheet that gives me an idea of which profiles have what links, if those links are follow or nofollow, and the PageRank of both the domain and my profile. We’ll see if I can use that info to my advantage in the coming weeks.

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 #4 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.