My Name is David Tan
This Is Part 1 Of An Adventure In SEO Ranking
In search engine optimization (SEO), the more original the name the easier it is dominate google’s search results. My name is David Tan. David is one of the most common names in the 20th Century. And Tan is a Chinese surname, need I say more. Now I’ve always loved my name—thanks mom and dad—but from a SEO perspective, this is a horrible name to have. But that’s alright. It just means we’ll have to work a little harder to achieve our goal.
About The Series: “My Name is David Tan”
This will be an ongoing series about improving the search rankings for one of the most common name combinations on the internet. So take a journey with me as we dive into how and what will help me rank first in google searches for “David Tan”.
I setup this site over this past weekend, and currently the ranking of this site for the keywords, “David Tan” is not even registering in the Google search rankings. So, I guess you could say, “we have our work cut out for us”.
So what are the items on Google’s magic to do list for ranking higher in search results: – Google says that we should focus on just producing good content that people will be interested in reading. Or to quote Matt Cutts, links shouldn’t just LOOK natural, they should BE natural.
What I Know About Google Search Engine Optimization
- Use web best practices (HTML, CSS).
- Include meta data like title and page descriptions.
- Include the keywords in the URL. In our case it’s “David Tan”.
- Make sure to include <h1> and other heading tags with relevant content.
- Have both internal and external links back to your pages. The link words should be relevant to the content users will find on the page. In our case those keywords will be, “David Tan”.
- If you’re writing a blog, make sure to take advantage of categories and tags. These will create additional internal links on your behalf. In our case, I’m going to add a tag called, “David Tan”.
- Google like a diversity of content types like images, videos, and social media inclusions.
- Make sure content is included in your XML sitemap. In our case we’re using the Yoast SEO wordpress plugin to automatically generate that.
- Make sure your robot.txt isn’t blocking your site from being indexed. In our case we’re using WordPress, and by default the site is set to discourage search indexing. I’ve changed this setting to allow for site indexing.
- Make sure your keywords, “David Tan” is in the site domain name. And it is. My site name is, “David Tan Design”.
- Make sure your page is being indexed by Google. You can check this by setting up an account with Google Search Console (previously named Google Webmaster Tools).
- Setup a Google Analytics account to help you keep tabs on your website traffic.
- Produce content on multiple pages with all of these recommendations. The pages we have for Google to find, the higher the chances are that some of the pages will show up in search results.
- Make sure your site is mobile friendly. These days Google indexes searches separately for “desktop” and “mobile”. We’re achieving that by the use of responsive CSS styling. This is possible by using media queries that target browser width to dictated how the design should be arranged.
So, what else do we know about Google search ranking
- The more unique the search, the easier it is to rank higher on the results because there’s less competition. So it will be harder for me to achieve the top search result for “David Tan” than it would be for my friend Terence Tuhinanshu. It would also be easier to achieve a top search result if I added the an extra word like “David Tan Design“.
- Along the way we can check our search rank to see how we’re doing, and more importantly, whether our rank is improving. You can use one of many tools like seocentro.com or serps.com to check your current ranking.
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