An SEO Experiment
Although I’m the #1 “Steve Lacey” on the popular search sites, as far as “Stephen Lacey” goes, in rate a #8 on the front page of Google, and I’m nowhere with the others.
Stephen is my real first name, and my mother hates it when I sign a birthday/christmas/etc… card as “Steve”.
I learnt that the hard way about twenty-five years ago.
Also, I use “Stephen” in any pseudo-legal, registration for conferences, etc… context. So it would be good if people who searched for me, well, found me.
Anyhow, in experiment number one, I’ve just added “Stephen Lacey” to the meta keywords. Lets see what effect that has. Yes I know I could employ the full SEO techniques, but I thought I’d see what actually works.
That means taking it one step at a time.
Btw, don’t you think that the search engines would consider “Steve”, “Steven” and “Stephen” as synonyms? Even if they gave greater weighting to exact matches, treating them as completely seperate semantic entities seems odd.
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There's much more to SEO than meta-tags (which are said to be dead anyway). Com'on STEVE, snap out of the 90's :-). However, since you've used "Stephen" on the main blog page now (oops, there it was again), you are actually ranking high for Stephen Lacey (without quotes), but still low for "Stephen Lacey" (with quotes). That is probably because you used "Stephen" several times on the page, but the combination "Stephen Lacey" (as in the meta-tags) is still not valued high enough.
Search Engines (Google especially) do not fall for meta-tag spam. Use good content and you'll reach your goal :-). Make sure you have "Stephen Lacey" as the title for all your pages as a starter and lay lots of links with "Stephen Lacey" as the anchor text, there are many things you could do; if you are interested, read up on the "Search Engine Ranking Factors": http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php and read their fine "beginners guide": http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php
But then again, do you really think your mother will check Google to see if you rank for your name? Just give her some flowers every now and then and visit her more often, then she'll be just as happy!
Stephen Lacey is such a great name.