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How to search engine optimize your name for $7 a year

It’s Ryan Pfister vs. Ryan Pfister in a search battle to the death. Or at least to the number one search result.

There’s another Ryan Pfister out west who also happens to specialize in Web development. When I Google my name, the pages returned are a mix of results for him and me (and possibly some other Ryan Pfisters I’m not familiar with). He’s got LinkedIn (I’m working on that). I get a boost from old Collegian articles (especially ones that get linked to from other Web sites).

Based on my occasional Googling of my name, it seems like the order in which the results appeared was random. But I want to be first. Just a fun exercise in search engine (and ego) optimization.

So when Ryan Pfister number 2 abandoned his ownership of ryanpfister.com recently, I jumped on it. I decided to try hosting it on 1&1. Very nice service — especially for $50 a year.

Within a week so of hosting a Wordpress blog there, I was getting the number one hit consistently.

But I don’t actually want to have spend money on this SEO project. So I canceled (keeping the domain registration for the very cheap $7 a year) and redirected the domain to blogspot, which conveniently offers free DNS hosting (as opposed to Wordpress.com, which charges you something like $10 per year).

All files besides the blog (like my experiments) will be hosted on my Penn State Web space.

When I graduate and my free Penn State Web hosting ends, I’ll either move to Google Page Creator or, if I need to run php scripts, go back to 1and1.

I’m going to watch to see if the blog remains in the number one spot. Plus, I have to make enough off Adsense (which is nicely integrated into Blogger) to earn back the $7 a year. But even if I don’t, it’s a small price to pay to be number one.

© 2007 Ryan Pfister.