What happens when you stop treating your portfolio as just a website and start treating it as a searchable representation of yourself? I decided to find out.
My existing portfolio appeared on the first page, along with multiple pieces of my online presence: Portfolio DEV.to article documenting the portfolio rebuild LinkedIn profile Images associated with my online presence
This isn't a claim that I've "mastered SEO." It's simply a milestone in an ongoing personal SEO experiment.
I've always thought of a personal portfolio as more than a place to display projects. It should answer a simple question:
When someone searches my name, I want them to be able to discover different parts of my work and understand that they're connected to the same person.
I'm currently rebuilding my personal portfolio as a Laravel application. The long-term goal is for the portfolio to become the central hub of my online presence.
Each platform has its own purpose. Portfolio → the central connection LinkedIn → professional identity GitHub → code and projects DEV.to → technical writing Royal Road → creative writing
I don't want every platform to become a copy of the portfolio. I want each one to represent a different side of me while pointing toward a central source.
The Google screenshot is the visible part. The more interesting part is the work happening behind the website. I've been working through the fundamentals of technical SEO rather than relying on a single trick or keyword. Meta Tags
One of the first things I focused on was making sure every important page has meaningful metadata.
Along with the standard viewport and other relevant metadata. The idea is simple: "Every page should clearly communicate what it is about." Canonical URLs
Canonicalization helps communicate the preferred URL for a page when similar or duplicate URLs could potentially exist. It's a small implementation detail, but an important part of maintaining a clean URL structure. Open Graph Metadata
SEO isn't limited to Google search results. A page should also look good when somebody shares it. That's why I worked with Open Graph metadata for social platforms.
This controls how pages can be represented when shared across supported platforms. Twitter/X Cards
Again, the goal isn't simply ranking. It's making sure the content is represented properly wherever the URL appears. JSON-LD / Schema.org
This is probably one of the more interesting parts of personal SEO. I worked with JSON-LD structured data to give search engines additional context about the website and the person behind it. A simplified example of the concept:
Instead of thinking of these as completely separate identities: Portfolio LinkedIn GitHub DEV.to
The goal is to provide signals that they represent the same person. ###Conceptually: