Last summer I did a little investigation as to how well my website ranked on Google for various search terms (a little one sided, but Google is the biggest search engine). When I first did the study, I looked at several terms.

Matthew Smith ranked somewhere on page 7 (so between position 61 and 70), Matthew A Smith and Matthew Aaron Smith were nowhere to be found, and digivation landed a number one ranking.

I later returned to the results to see how my strategic keyword usage modified my rankings. To my surprise, Matthew Smith had risen to position forty, a gain of 30+ positions. Apparently I didn’t revisit any of the other search terms.

So now, almost a year later, I have decided to return once again to my little SEO tricks and see what sorts of improvements my original search terms have made. Here are the juicy details:

Matthew Smith – now on page three, holding down a respectable #24
Matthew A Smith – umm… how’s #196. Thankfully, this is not the most important term
Matthew Aaron Smith – not even in the top 200. Never mind.
digivation - well, I still dominate this search term. Guess that’s a sort of unique term, so maybe its not terribly fair.

I hope to someday be able to Google “Matthew Smith” and find my website in the top 10. A number one spot would be really cool, but to get that I’m gonna have to release something cool and get a bunch of link love. Either that or blog about myself a lot more… on a side note, Dave is lucky – he has the number one spot for “David Comeaux.” But in my defense, there are a lot more “Matthew Smiths” out there, and his name is in his url, which gives him several points in the search results.