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The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google – Week 40

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The Search for Alan Reeves - 1st on Google - Week 40 - Wikipedia picture

Image from Wikipedia

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 40th 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, 39th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 10-29-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

This week I’m at #3, same as last week.  The first occurrence of a link that is pointing to one of my sites is #28.  Overall, my top 5 results increased 5 place with 3 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 Google Images showed my picture at #3 and a total of 10 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:

Overall, I showed up 6 times in the top 100 search results on Bing.  My first occurrence was at #4 (compared with Google at #3) and overall, my results decreased 3 places.

I did manage to show up at #2 for images on Bing, and overall, had 3 in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week my goal was to comment on 25+ blogs.  I didn’t make it to that many, but I did comment on 17.  The results have not changed yet, but any little bit helps.  Eventually, those comments will add to the total links back to my content and often, with my name as the anchor text.  To date, I have 1,792 links pointing back to my two domains (BlueCapra.com and BookWormLaser.com) not to mention any pointing to any social media profiles, forum posts, etc.

I was able to add a few extra links back to my stuff, one from Wikipedia and several others from StumbleUpon.  Months ago, I submitted an image of some laser engraved glass I created and photographed under high magnification.  You can see the picture at the top of this post or check out this Wikipedia link.  Initially, I was looking to get backlinks from a high ranked domain such as Wikipedia and to provide interesting pictures.  I started to look around the articles for laser engraving and found a short section on laser engraved glass.  Since I had the picture, I submitted it and added it to the page.

Just a few days ago, I added a link back to my business site, Book Worm Laser & Design, with my name and business name as the anchor text.  The link is a NoFollow link but hopefully, it will help out a bit more than some of the others I have been getting.

Another technique I have resurrected was submitting my content to StumbleUpon.  Months ago, I stopped linking to my own content in StumbleUpon due to several posts mentioning getting banned and how spammy it was just to submit your own content, especially if you don’t really use the service.  I agreed with the concept and thus, stopped submitting to StumbleUpon.  That is, until recently.

Just a few days ago, I read a great article on using StumbleUpon to get more business and clients.  In that post, it described how important StumbleUpon could be to your online efforts.  I decided to leave a comment and ask the author, P. James Holland, what he thought about promoting your own content via the various social media sites if you don’t use them.  His answer was basically that if you don’t promote your own stuff, who will and that I could use the StumbleUpon toolbar to promote other content I already read.

Surprisingly, that was a light bulb moment.  For some reason, I had never considered adding some of the great posts I read throughout the week to StumbleUpon.  If I added just a few a day, those submissions would far exceed the 3-4 bits of content I publish a week.  Using that simple technique cleared my conscious and had encouraged me to use StumbleUpon once again.  I hope that this change will help with this journey to be #1.

Summary – The search for Alan Reeves

I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress these past many weeks, going from #91 on 1-25-12 to #3 on 3-11-12 and to #3 today. I have learned a lot about improving search ranking and I have made a lot of mistakes, but this is a learning process.  I hope to make significant progress by next week and regain my past progress.  Stay tuned to see if next week is the week I reach the 1st spot on Google and Bing.  If you have any suggestions to get me there, leave a comment and let me know.

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