Would you like to be ranked 1st on Google? I would. Not necessarily with my business or personal blog, but when someone searched my name, Alan Reeves, I want to be ranked 1st, maybe not on all the search engines, but at least at Google. Narcissistic, maybe, but from a business and marketing standpoint, who would not want to be #1 on Google for something. But how can I do such a thing?
I am no SEO expert, but I am willing to learn. I now have a (very specific) goal and I am just curious enough to see how long it will take me. First, I need to determine where I am.
Google is great at incorporating other services into their search. When I am logged in under my GMail account, my likes, friends, and posts are taken into account when Google returns the search results. Since I am trying to show up 1st to a complete stranger, that nice feature makes it a bit more difficult to test. To get around that feature, I could either log out of my account or do my searching on a completely separate computer. I decided not to log out and do my searching on other computers and devices, including public computers when available, such as at the library. Now that I have that squared away, I need to figure out where I am starting from.
Where do I compare to that 1st spot
As of January 25, 2012, I show up #91 with my About page at my personal website, BlueCapra.com. That is a long way from the 1st spot, so I have my work cut out for me. As an interesting side note, my Google+ picture shows up beside the link to my blog. If you want to know how I did this, you can walk through the steps yourself on this post by Amit Agarwal on Digital Inspirations. I also show up at the following places (to round out the top 5):
#93 – A book review I left on BookSneeze
#98 – My author page at EzineArticles.com – I wrote an article about laser engraving glass
#99 – A comment I left at 48Days.com
#101 – my Google+ profile (displayed with picture)
My restriction
The link has to be obvious to me and not a link to a page that might contain a link to a page. For example, I did not even go to any site that said there were 25 people named Alan Reeves on whatever website. I wanted to only count the links that directed traffic to a page with my content or information.
My Google search settings on the computer where I performed this initial search is as follows
Google Instant Predictions – OFF (easier to display a longer list of results)
SafeSearch Filters – Strict
Results per page – 100
I also cleared my cache, cookies, history, whatever I could so I could get as accurate of results as I could
Search results vary from day-to-day so I will be doing an official search twice a week and sharing the results. I will share the steps I take, including links, once a week. There are a few more things I can tweak on my business site, Book Worm Laser & Design and I will share those as well. I hope my journey to ranking 1st on Google helps you with your own SEO. Stay tuned.
(photo by: sheelamohan)
WordPress is a great framework for a website. You can easily add content, create pages, and customize the site to include just about anything. No matter how good the design is or how great the graphics are, if you can’t get traffic to your site, people won’t buy your products or hear your message. In business, it something doesn’t get tracked, it doesn’t get improved. One way to track your site traffic do is Google Analytics and yes, there is a plugin for that. The one I choose is 
WordPress has become a standard if not the standard template based blog and website platform. It is written in PHP, is very easy to edit and customize with a plugin or two, and with the available themes, there is very little it can’t do. For those who have not tried setting up a WordPress site, it can be intimidating in the beginning. The good news is that there is so much knowledge out there available for free that can help you, so many free themes that look great, and many people that would be more than happy (for a fee) to help you. I have been programming for years and was very intimidated when I started my WordPress site. The more you work with it, the more you understand.