How I got my portfolio highly ranked on my name in search engines (WIP)
Published at: a month ago
Front-end development
In this article I will write on how I got my portfolio ranked fairly high in search engines at least on my own name. I will give some tips you can use on your own especially if you're a web developer.
Why is it important to rank your portfolio high?
See your portfolio as the advertisement of you as a person. You don't want your competitors to get that spot. When a someone sees your name and wants to look you up, you want them to find you! Also when people look for your job, you should be able to be findable! Everyone start at least with googling.
Getting started
First you have to separate the things you can control and the things you can't. If you are a developer and are building your own website you have control on a lot of things to most of the things. This includes performance, meta tags, semantics and website content. If you use a website builder you may have less controls so check if you can do every step. If not you can decide to do without and take your time to optimally improve the other options.
Step 1: Check your home page and semantics!
When you look me up you immediately see a summary of google because I implemented the heading 1 (h1 tag) correctly. This may go sometimes wrong with website builders because people like the styling of the heading 2 (h2 tag). This heading 1 is also in my header section telling google this is what the most important information of my page is. And for me the heading 1 is Finn Kuiper, my name. The first h2 is my about section. Use something like the keyword about as fast as possible. Tell google who you are! Tell them I'm a developer passionate about building clean, functional web applications for example for me. Keep these things in mind when organizing your website. Use sections, title your sections with the correct heading (almost no page has 2 heading 1), add a paragraph and describe, describe, describe.
Step 2: Check your performance!
It takes a simple search to find out. Performance matters! No your loading screens do not fix it. Google is very open about ranking on speed and people ignore it. For this you need to check Largest Contentful paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift. These metrics make sure you deliver a smooth user experience but now also a good Google seo score.