Search Engine Optimization 2018 round 1
While browsing developer portfolios for inspiration, I ran into a post by Rafael Caferati (link below). My interest in SEO runs nowhere as deep as his, yet anyone in this business should know the basics. In the 2000s I ran a "flash blog" on this domain which was generating around 500 visits a day at its peak.
My Blogging days went down the drain with the demise of Flash, and my Google Ranking plummeted along with it. Googling "sakri" would lead a user to my website around page 8. To rectify this grave injustice I:
- bought an ssl certificate (all pages are now https)
- made sure all my social media profiles link to sakri.net
- used vanillaJS with minimal external libraries etc. minified and entirely embedded in the app.html files to reduce server calls and shorten loads as much as possible. The apps are under 100kb each, (with a few images).
- copied the metadata structure from some highly visible sites and adjusted to my own
- registered a local business through Google. It's a bit weird to have my home address so visible, but I'm renting at the moment anyway.
- Although the "cards menu apps" contain all their text content in their html markup, the build script also generates html files for every card. For example : portfolio/sakri_dot_net.html; This file contains all the metadata, a generated nav with links to all the portfolio pages/apps and some other template content.
- made sure sitemaps contain all the apps and generated html files, pointe to by robots.txt
- Submitted sitemaps to my Google Search Console
- added Google adsense "auto ads" to all the generated html pages (gonna be a millionaire any day now)
- ...and a few other minor efforts not worth the mention.
All this took some effort, but it's started to pay off :
- google.com/search?q=sakri : first page!
- q=frontend+developer+portfolio+brussels : first page
- google.com/search?q=creative+coder+brussels : third result
I'm actually doing better on Bing and Duck Duck Go than google :D
The current goal is to reclaim my throne for "sakri" from the wikipedia article (Sakri : a census town in the Dhule District of India), and actually increase visibility to the point where I no longer have to search for projects (yes, a man can dream ;) )
As promised here's the article that sparked this :
Rafael Caferatis on SEODiscuss this article on Reddit (I'll get notified) :
reddit.com/r/sakri/