The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 43rd 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, 42nd Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Monday, 11-19-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#4 – My LinkedIn profile (down 1 place from last week at #3)
#18 – My profile at Brand Yourself (no change from last week at #18)
#28 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (no change from last week at #28)
#35 – Book Worm Laser & Design videos on Daily Motion (down 2 places from last week at #33)
#38 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (down 4 places from last week at #34)

This week I’m at #3. The first occurrence of a link that is pointing to one of my sites is #28. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 7 place with 2 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 13 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #4 and a total of 8 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:

#4 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #4)
#20 – My profile on Quora (up 1 place from last week at #21)
#22 – My profile on Quora – same as the previous link??? (up 5 places from last week at #21)
#28 – Google+ profile for Book Worm Laser & Design (up 2 places from last week at #30)
#42 – My About page on Quora (up 56 places from last week at #31)

This week I’m at #4 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results increased 64 place with 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 6 times in the top 100 search results.

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

Strategies for 1st

Another uneventful week for the search. Can’t seem to break through the #3 spot but then again, the competition is much (much) bigger than anything I can throw at the internet. All I can do is put out more content, look for more tactics, and keep on measuring. Nothing improves unless it is measured and as of now, I have 43 weeks of measurements that will continue until I am at #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 #4 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 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.