Personal SEO – Getting to 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 84th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves. If you missed any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 83rd Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 9-1-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#1 – My Vizify profile – (no change from last week at #1)
#4 – My Pinterest profile (no change from last week at #4)
#5 – My profile on GoodReads (no change from last week at #5)
#14 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (no change from last week at #14)
#17 – My About page on BlueCapra (no change from last week at #17)

This week I’m still at #1. Overall, my top 5 results neither increased or decreased with 5 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 15 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #5 and a total of 15 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)
#15 – My profile on 48Days.NET (no change from last week at #15)
#18 – Alan Reeves on About.Me (down 1 place from last week at #17)
#20 – My BrandYourself profile (down 1 place from last week at #19)
#40 – My YouTube profile (up 2 places from last week at #42)

This week I’m at #5 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results did not change position 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 #6 and a total of 7 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week was a little bit of a busy week. Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a short ebook to teach people how to use QR codes better. After a ton of work, Scan This Guide: Getting More Likes, More Website Traffic, and Get Found Easier with QR codes was released. If you are a small business owner or just curious about QR codes, you can get it for free by following the link.

Launching an ebook (even a free one) with an accompanying site doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else. But, all the work put into this new site can only help things.

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 #1 on 7-14-13 and to #1 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 I can hold on to the 1st spot on Google and and reach 1st on 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.