Learning By Doing

SEOpsCentre

About SEOpsCentre

March 28th, 2008 at 12:35 am

I’m Number 1 In Google (for a really specific query - but, hey;)

I did a vanity check on Google last night. Just out of curiosity, I wondered whether I was showing up in searches for my own name yet.

I’m not. The first page of results brings up:

I bet Rand Fishkin never had this problem.
The thing is that there are a hell of a lot of other people in the world called Ken Jones. Seriously, it’s like we’re John Smith or something. I was already prepared for this revelation of my common-ness because about a year ago, in a moment of boredom while I was working away from home and stuck in a hotel with free wi-fi, I decided to have a look on MySpace and check to see how many other Ken Joneses were on there. Turned out there were over 700. So I decided to send friend requests to all the other Kens that had logged onto their profiles during the previous six months (about 250 in total - told you I was bored) and ended up getting myself quite a collection of friends called Ken Jones. It was all very Are You Dave Gorman?but without the book deal. I even started a MySpace group called the Brotherhood of Kens, with the slogan “We are Ken Jones, resistance is futile” but nothing ever really came of that and the novelty soon wore off, so apart from making a point of posting “Happy Birthday from another Ken Jones” messages whenever I noticed a Ken Jones birthday coming up it all went very quiet, very quickly.

I’d pretty much forgotten about the whole thing until a couple of days ago when I got a friend request on Facebook from a guy called Kenny Jones. It seems he’s decided to do the same thing on Facebook. I don’t know if there’s something about being called Ken Jones that makes people curious about finding out about other people called Ken Jones. Maybe it’s just us and Dave Gorman, but I’m not called Dave Gorman, so it’s not like I’ve ever been approached by someone trying to find other Dave Gormans.
Perhaps Kenny will create a really thriving community of Ken Joneses on Facebook. Or perhaps the novelty will wear off in a week or so for him as well. All I know is that if he keeps spamming me with invites to stupid applications he’ll soon have one less Ken Jones in his little club.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. After all I did say I was number 1 in Google. All it took was the addition of the phrase SEO to my query. So…

Search for Ken Jones = about a billion other Kens but no me.
Search for Ken Jones SEO = Little ol’ me right at the top of the page, even above www.kenjones.co.za and his site about internet marketing. And I wasn’t even trying.

Now I don’t expect for a second that anyone is likely to actually search for my name + SEO anytime soon (or ever) but it did give me an idea for a little bit of an experiment to see if I could get ranked for just Ken Jones. It’s clearly an unintentionally competitive keyword phrase, just by virtue of the number of other people out there who share the name, but I seriously doubt anybody else would be actively trying to optimize their sites for it, so I figure it’ll be an interesting to try and practice without getting in anyone else’s way.

I’ve already been using my name as the anchor text on links back to this site when I post comments on other people’s blogs, so that should be helping Google to figure out that this site is relevant for the term “Ken Jones” (at least for those blogs that share the link love by not using rel=nofollow on their comments) and I’ve certainly used the phrase a hell of a lot during this particular post (but hopefully without seeming so spammy about it that Matt Cutts would get annoyed with me).

I’ll keep plugging away with this little trial and post updates on my progress and SERP positions in between my regular posts for the Beginner’s Guide to WordPress and SEO.

If you digg what I've written, give me a sphinn (puns intended - sorry ;-) )