The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 44th 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, 43rd Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Monday, 11-26-12 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#3 – My LinkedIn profile (up 1 place from last week at #4)
#13 – My profile at Brand Yourself (up 5 places from last week at #18)
#21 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (up 7 places from last week at #28)
#34 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (up 1 place from last week at #35)
#39 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (down 1 place from last week at #38)

This week I’m at #3. The first occurrence of a link that is pointing to one of my sites is #21. Overall, my top 5 results increased 13 places with 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 16 times in the top 100 search results, a new record!

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #4 and a total of 9 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 4 Bing results:

#4 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #4)
#23 – My profile on Quora (down 3 places from last week at #20)
#35 – Google+ profile for Book Worm Laser & Design (down 13 places from last week at #22)
#49 – My feed on Quora (down 21 places from last week at #28)

This week I’m at #4 on Bing. Overall, my top 4 results decreased 37 place with 2 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 4 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

This week’s work resulted in 2 post comments and 2 more linked (or tagged or whatever they are calling it) pages on Bing. I was able to do a little digging to see where my back links are coming from. It seems that, even though I have commented on a bunch of sites, only a few are showing up on my back link list in Google Webmaster tools. I have tried to focus my attention on those sites while looking around for other sites to comment on. A comment should only be left if it can add to the discussion or the community as a while, not for back links or publicity. That rule should be followed by more people.

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 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.