Tim Bennett’s blog – Electron Soup

Three days, and a couple of changes, after my initial post on increasing my Google rank, I’ve gone up from #9 to #4 in Google for “Tim Bennett”. So how did I improve my Google rank five places in three days?

What I’ve done so far

• Moved my website tagline (“Tim Bennett’s bits and pieces”) into the <h1> section of the header
• Added meta tags to my Wordpress template:

<meta name="description" content="Tim Bennett's personal site, including blog, resume, links and portfolio.">
<meta name="keywords" content="tim, bennett, tim bennett, electron, soup, electron soup, blog, biography, information, resume, portfolio">

• Claimed my site on Google Webmaster Tools and filled in some extra information about it (preferred domain, geographic target, robots.txt)
• Installed the Google XML Sitemaps plugin and submitted a sitemap to Google (making sure my pages are all catalogued)

That’s pretty much all I’ve done so far. I think the first two are the most important (thanks for the suggestion, Kunaal), because they put my key search phrases in places where Google’s likely to look for them, and assign them importance.

So what’s next?

There are some other challenges ahead. Many of the inbound links to my page have the anchor text “Electron Soup” or “Flashman” (the latter, as most of you will know, being my online pseudonym these past six years). Not surprisingly I rank first for “Electron Soup”, though I expected to rank a little higher than 24th for “Flashman”. Even my Twitter account and previous blog rank higher than this site for “Flashman”! (No, you can’t read my old blog. It’s too embarrassing to contemplate.)

The competition

Unfortunately the assault on the top three positions is going to be difficult. I am up against:

1. A programmer’s website with over 2.2 million page views
2. A YouTube video (Google properties mysteriously rise to the top of search rankings)
3. A UK government website (the .gov extension carries a lot of influence with search engines)

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but these three may take a bit of beating.