Just so you know, this post is going to be a bit more me-centric than most of the posts here on SEOpsCentre so feel free to skip it if you’d rather wait for one of my usual posts about Search Engine Optimization.

Having said that, there will be a lot of talk about SERP placements, some pretty useful link research tips and a look at what I did to rank on the first page of Google.com for an unintentionally competitive keyphrase.  My own name.

So I don’t know, maybe you’ll want to stick around, y’know just in case.
But if you don’t find out anything interesting about SEO, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Where do I rank in searches for Ken Jones?

A few months ago, I wrote about trying to get this site to rank in search results for queries for my own name.  Simple enough you might think, but if your name happens to be Ken Jones, it’s not quite as easy as all that.  You see, there are a lot of other people in the world who are also called Ken Jones and a lot of them have websites.  In fact, if you search for Ken Jones in Google.com you’ll see it returns over 930,000 results, but (at the time of writing) if you scroll down the results you’ll find SEOpsCentre listed right there on the first page of those results, which is pretty good going considering I wasn’t showing up anywhere in those SERPs just a couple of months ago.  And if you perform an exact match search for “Ken Jones” I rank even higher, although there’s only about a quarter of a million pages returned with the exact match for “Ken Jones” so the competition isn’t quite as great.

I’m not ranking quite so well in Google.co.uk yet.  At the time of writing, SEOpsCentre is floating around page 9 of the results for a standard search for Ken Jones and even lower for exact match “Ken Jones” searches.

Incidentally, I’m still ranking first for Ken Jones SEO and for Big Dumb Noob (I know there’s no real value in ranking for that one, I just think it’s funny ).

What signals am I giving Google that this site is relevant for searches about Ken Jones?

There are obviously a lot of on-page references to my name, with the by lines for every post I write and every time I reply to a comment from a reader, as well as the occasional post like this, where I mention the name Ken Jones several times over, which as time goes on has given Google more reason to see this site as being a relevant result when people search for Ken Jones.

There are also more links from other sites which now use Ken Jones as the anchor text of their links to SEOpsCentre.  The majority of these are no-followed links from comments that I have made, so they aren’t going to be helping my cause, but there are also a few followed links within posts that reference some of the articles I’ve written and comments on do-follow blogs, which are passing value to this site with Ken Jones as the anchor text.  There aren’t that many though, in fact after checking for links that use my name with the handy Analyze Backlinks tool, I could probably count the number of value passing links using Ken Jones without needing to take off my shoes and socks (i.e. there’s less than ten of them ).

Overall, my link profile is looking pretty healthy these days as well, with Yahoo! Site Explorer showing over 1700 links to the site’s homepage, and thanks to Joost De Valk’s Link Analysis plugin for Firefox I can see what the anchor text and follow status of all those links are.  This reinforces my findings from the Analyze Backlinks tool; only a handful of these links use Ken Jones as their anchor text and in most cases they are no-followed links from comments I have left on other sites.  However, the fact that the majority of these links are passing value, with SEOpsCentre as their anchor text, is still helping to light up my site for the search engines which is giving the site an extra boost, causing it to rise higher in the SERPs.  One thing that’s become clear is that most of these links come from American and Canadian sites, which explains why my Google.com rankings are so much higher than my placements in Google.co.uk (so I guess the next phase of my plan should be to try and gain more links from my fellow Brits).

What’s next for Ken Jones the SEO from Coventry?

Well, that heading should give you a little hint.  I’m still planning to try to build upon my current successes in ranking for just the phrase Ken Jones and for the more specific Ken Jones SEO queries, but I also want to add more focus to ranking for searches for my name + my location.  I’ve lived in Coventry in the UK for nearly 20 years now (having grown up in Brisbane, Australia before that) so it’s likely that if anyone is specifically trying to find me among the the haystack of Ken Joneses on the internet, they may well use Coventry as a modifier to narrow down their search.  In the circumstances, I don’t think I’ll need to go to the full effort of optimizing for local search (although it’s something that I’ve been meaning to practice anyway) but I will be trying out a few things to see if I start appearing in searches for Ken Jones Coventry.  There are only a handful of results for that term at the moment, so I have a feeling that just using the phrase in this post will be enough to achieve the desired effect.

We’ll see how it all goes and I’ll post another update the next time I notice some significant progress in my placements in the SERPs.