Earlier this year a good friend of mine started optimising his website in the hope of getting a Google ranking for his own name. For 99% of those who try, this is a challenge enough, but when you're a guy who makes bits of particle accelerators (specifically, I think, the "ion source" at ISIS) and your name is ranking highly on domains belonging to UK academic institutions like ISIS and global scientific projects like CERN, you know you've got a job on your hands if you want to outrank the big guys.

Numerous conversations at parties about SEO later (including buying a few amazing domains like particleaccelerators.co.uk), he's got himself a position 1 ranking for his own name (ok, it's moving about a bit but not bad, eh?) by carrying some simple SEO changes like setting up some 301 redirects (turns out there were quite a few domains bought up), some good link building, reviewing and realigning his inbound links, and making proper use of H1's, meta titles, and quality outbound links.

It's the list of activities that he carried out, by date that are most interesting to me, and there's definitely some conversation to be had here on the value of each step taken, so please, I'd really like to hear your thoughts!

In date order, here's what he did:

1. 03-Jan-2008 - First proper website was built and set live
2. 08-Jan-2008 - Registered Google Webmaster Tools
3. 12-Jan-2008 - Redirected all other owned domains to the .info site
4. 20-Jan-2008 - Google first listed the site at position 3 but site fluctuates between 3rd and 14th until the 19th April
   
5. 13-Mar-2008 - Changed two indexed PowerPoint files that were ranking higher by putting links in the files to back to domain and the various other keyword domains
6. 20-Mar-2008 - Ensured that every PowerPoint presentation published links back to site. At time of writing about 5 presentations are out there now, including a few hosted on lab websites (CERN, Frankfurt etc)
7. Search string fluctuated between position 14 and position 3 on a daily basis until 19-April-2008
8. 19-Apr-2008 Search string first listed at number 2
   

He made some really impacting changes and for me, it's all about the epac06 and Powerpoint links. Those Powerpoint links hosted on the high authority domains have got to be passing some good pagerank.  Almost exactly one month after rolling out all of the changes to the documents hosted online, the rankings stopped fluctuating and stabilised. Fantastic! Come to think about it, those rankings were all over the place...

So, your thoughts are welcome, especially on the document links, and if you want to give him some "next steps" advice, be my guest. He's got the bug now, and he's really excited about his next project - getting a ranking for particle accelerators! Good break from actually building them, eh?

Richard Baxter is Founder and Director of SEOgadget.co.uk, a UK SEO Agency. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz...