The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 75th 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, 73rd Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 6-30-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#3 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (no change from last week at #3)
#4 – My Pinterest profile (no change from last week at #4)
#15 – My About page (down 1 place from last week at #14)
#19 – My videos on Vimeo (down 1 place from last week at #18)
#30 – My profile on About.Me (no change from last week at #30)

This week I’m at #3. 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 9 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #11 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:

#5 – My LinkedIn profile with picture (no change from last week at #5)
#13 – My profile on 48Days.NET (down 2 places from last week at #15)
#16 – My BrandYourself profile (up 1 place from last week at #17)
#23 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (up 4 places from last week at #27)
#25 – This site, BlueCapra.com (up 4 places from last week at #29)

This week I’m at #4 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results increased 7 places with 5 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 #14 and a total of 6 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week I have focused on Pinterest and enhancing my profiles and boards. From an SEO and backlink viewpoint, I have a profile with a PR of 3 and a couple of boards with PRs of 2. With my profiles showing up at #3 and #4, Pinterest has the potential of being a great source of quality backlinks. Plus, Pinterest is a fun place to explore, waste time, and get ideas.

It is interesting to see how many followers some people have on Pinterest. To find some interesting people and boards to explore, I used TopPinterestUsers.com. According to the site, the top 5 users on Pinterest each have over 8.4 million followers. 8.4 million at the least. The top user has over 14 million. In terms of SEO, the top user’s profile has a PR of 6 and the #5 user has a PR of 5. Not only that, they have tons of boards and great pins.

Even the last profile on the site, #181, has over 500,000 followers and a PR of 5. Pinterest profiles have a follow link back to your website once your site is verified. If you can build up your profile high enough, the result is a nice bit of SEO goodness flowing back to your website. It’s worth a try.

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 #3 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.