BlueCapra

1st on Google – Week 17

Alan Reeves — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:00:13 +0000

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 17th update. If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 16th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 05-20-12 (click here to do your own search):

#5 - My LinkedIn profile (up 8 places from last week at #13)
#15 - My personal blog, BlueCapra.com, with picture!!! (up 8 places from last week at #23)
#29 - My profile on Vimeo - check out my video series Can You Etch It (up 4 place from last week at #25)
#32 - The About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture!!! (down 5 places from last week at #27)
#34 – My business Pinterest profile, BookWormLaser (down 3 places from last week at #31)

This week I am at #5, back up from the past few weeks. One interesting order change that I noticed; my Linkedin profile showed up before the general Linkedin search for Alan Reeves. Overall, my top 5 results increased 16 places with only 2 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. I showed up 11 times in the top 100 search results.

I have a picture!!!

After several weeks without one, my results now show up with my picture. This is a big deal to me because pages with the pictures in the results have a higher click through rate and therefore, result in more traffic. Plus, it looks cool and is a boost to the old ego.

Image Search

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #3 and a total of 11 occurrences in the top 100 images. The image results are still not something I am concentrating on, but due to the appropriate ALT and description tags on my images, most of the 11 in the top 100 are from this series of posts.

Cornering the market – from Google to Bing

Last week, I started to check Bing in addition to Google due to the percentage of the US searches being performed on Google, Bing, and Yahoo (which is powered by Bing technology). Here are the top 3 Bing results (there were only 3 in the top 100):

#2 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #2)
#22 - @alanreeves on Twitter (down 2 places from last week at #20)
#25 - The About page on BlueCapra.com (down 1 place from last week at #53)
#33 - My personal blog, BlueCapra.com (up 1 place from last week at #34)
#40 – My profile on Quora (up 16 places from last week at #56)

Overall, I showed up 7 times in the top 100 search results on Bing. My first occurrence was at #2 (compared with Google at #5) and my results increased 14 spots. No pictures in the top 100 on Bing.

Strategies for 1st

This week I commented on 6 posts as well as publishing 5 posts, a video, and a handful of pictures. I answered a few questions on Quora and have noticed a little bit of benefit already. I often search for more techniques to improve search results and after 17 weeks, I am doing just about all the ones I can find. Article submission was once a great place for back links but the latest Google updates have rendered those type sites less useful. It looks like I am making slow but steady progress, I just wish it was just a bit faster.

As with every week, I am searching for tips and hints that will help on my journey to be 1st on Google. Most of the techniques involving backlinks tend to be slow, with is painfully obvious since this is the 17th week update. Nevertheless, I am still pressing on.

Summary

I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress so far, going from #93 on 1-25-12 to #3 on 3-11-12 even though I have slipped to #5. 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.

Thanks for reading 1st on Google – Week 17. I would appreciate your comments and feedback on this post, so please let me know what you think. If you like the post, please share it with your friends. If you want to read more, subscribe to the RSS feed. Have a great day.

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Tattoo Design – The Hunger Games and Mockingjay

Alan Reeves — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

I enjoy good symbols, logos, and designs. A while ago I shared a few interesting tattoos I found of the Deathly Hallows from Harry Potter. This time, it is The Hunger Games. I just saw the movie and finished all three books. Here are some great tattoos from around the web:

Pair of Mockingjay

Here is a great pair of matching tattoos with the Mockingjay design. The element of this tattoo that really stands out to me is the decorative frame around the central design. Looks great.

(from http://inkah.tumblr.com/)

Mockingjay with a quote

This one is a bit bigger than the previous and includes the quote, “May the odds be ever in your favor”, often spoken by people involved in the Games from The Capital.

(from http://www.minx.com.au)

The golden Mockingjay pin

Another nice Mockingjay logo in gold that looks to be about 3 inches across. I really like the color, especially since most tattoos tend to be darker. Looks very much like what you would expect the pin given to Katniss Everdeen would look like. This one is sure to get attention.

(from http://www.wildsoundmovies.com/)

Mockingjay in a dream

One of the most creative designs I have seen, here is the Mockingjay design incorporated into a Native American dreamcatcher with what appears to be the quote, “She had no idea the effect she can have on people”, a quote spoken by Peeta Mellark, one of the central characters in the story. The use of gold for the Mockingjay looks like the pin that Katniss Everdeen is given as a token from her district to wear in the games.

(from http://weheartit.com/)

Deathly Mockingjay

This last design is not a tattoo that I could find, but the design is so good, I had to include it. It could aptly be named the Deathly Mockingjay, due to the combination of the Mockingjay and Deathly Hallows from Harry Potter.

(from http://alwaysadaydreamer.tumblr.com/)

If you liked any of these designs, please use the links and let the owners know. Thanks

Thanks for reading Tattoo Design – The Hunger Games and Mockingjay. I would appreciate your comments and feedback on this post, so please let me know what you think. If you like the post, please share it with your friends. If you want to read more, subscribe to the RSS feed. Have a great day.

Have you read these posts?

Tattoo Design – The Deathly Hallows

BlueCapra - Ideas, concepts, and laser engraving

1st on Google – Week 16

Alan Reeves — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 16th update. If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 15th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 05-06-12 (click here to do your own search):

#13 - My personal blog, BlueCapra.com, no picture??? (down 8 places from last week at #5)
#23 - My Google+ profile with picture (down 14 spot from last week at #9)
#25 - @bookwormlaser on Twitter ( down 2 spots from last week at #23)
#27 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, no picture (down 3 spots from last week at #24)
#31 - My profile on Vimeo - check out my video series Can You Etch It (down 6 place from last week at #25)

This week I am at #13, a dramatic drop of 8 places from last week. The top spots #1 – #4 are occupied again by Wikipedia, IMDb, and LinkedIn (all the people named Alan Reeves, there are 25 of us). Overall, my top 5 results decreased 33 places with only 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. I showed up 11 times in the top 100 search results which is down from the record of 13 last week.

No Picture???

Last week, I discovered that my picture was no longer showing up in the results. I expect this is due to a change in the structure of the site, altering my permalink structure to remove the year and adding 301 redirect in my htaccess file. If this does not make any sense to you, don’t worry. Basically, I changed the address to all my posts. In doing that, I needed to tell Google that the old links should point to the new locations (via a 301 redirect). You do this by putting a line of code in the htaccess file on your webserver. For more information, check out this Wikipedia article on URL redirection.

I made the changes more than a week ago but it seems that Google is either still mad or hasn’t crawled the pages yet. To make sure you have your rel=Author tag and everything setup correctly, you can use Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool. You can see the results of my test at the top of the page. Everything appears to be right, but still no picture. This week I am going to do a little more digging to see what is going on with that.

Image Search

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #1 again and a total of 11 occurrences in the top 100 images. Showing up 1st in the image results has never been that important to me, but the result is more backlinks. I even found a few sites where some of the picture I have taken were reposted. I guess I need to start taking pictures again…

Cornering the market – from Google to Bing

#2 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #2)
#20 - @alanreeves on Twitter (down 1 from last week at #19)
#24 - The About page on BlueCapra.com (up 29 spots from last week at #53)
#34 - My personal blog, BlueCapra.com
#56 - @bookwormlaser on Twitter

Overall, I showed up 5 times in the top 100 search results on Bing. My first occurrence was at #2 (compared with Google at #5) and my results increased 28 spots. It was really more than that since I gained 2 more occurances in the top 100. No pictures in the top 100 on Bing.

Strategies for 1st

This week I commented on 7 posts as well as publishing 5 posts and a handful of pictures. I have been looking at ways to find more links and came across an older post that wrote about different directory submissions that resulted in links. I signed up for a handful of accounts and will be checking the links later in the week to see if any of them have popped up.

As with every week, I am searching for tips and hints that will help on my journey to be 1st on Google. Most of the techniques involving backlinks tend to be slow, with is painfully obvious since this is the 16th week update. Nevertheless, I am still pressing on.

Summary

I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress so far, going from #93 on 1-25-12 to #3 on 3-11-12 even though I have slipped to #13. 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.

Thanks for reading 1st on Google – Week 16. I would appreciate your comments and feedback on this post, so please let me know what you think. If you like the post, please share it with your friends. If you want to read more, subscribe to the RSS feed. Have a great day.

Have you read these posts?

BlueCapra - Ideas, concepts, and laser engraving