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.

Click for the 1st week update

(photo by: sheelamohan)