Personal SEO

Two weeks ago I was search­ing my own name on Google to see what sort of pres­ence I had for my name. I know there is a hockey player who has a fair bit of atten­tion and there used to be an Olympic sprinter, so how did I fair?

I did alright, it turned out that at that time my Twit­ter account was higher ranked than this blog! I was shocked.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Opti­miza­tion. And it means under­stand­ing, at the most basic lev­els, how Google (and other engines to a lesser extent) search and rank your web­site. Yes Google is largely based off of other links to your page, but also is a whole host of fac­tors you as a blog­ger can affect. While we (SEO peo­ple) don’t know the exact for­mula for Google’s secret sauce, peo­ple with infi­nite patience and a algo­rith­mic approach are able to deter­mine the impor­tance of var­i­ous factors.

For exam­ple we know that hav­ing the search term in your domain is a major boost. So “PatrickJarrett.com” would imme­di­ately be bet­ter than “TrickJarrett.com.” Things like the use of the <H1> tags, the appear­ance of the search phrase inside the body of the page, whether it is bolded, or in links or in image alt text. The list goes on. I’ve seen lists of over 250 things which affect how your page is ranked.

All I did to bump Trick­Jar­rett from the 2nd page of results for “Patrick Jar­rett” is add an H1, add it to the title tag, mod­ify some word­ings to use the full name and sure enough this morn­ing I’m front page and #4 on the results. With a bit more work I can be the #1 result for my name.