PHP Developer 1, Google 0

I’ve had a personal website which has included my resume since the late 90s. It’s always had periodic traffic from recruiters who stumbled upon it via search engines. Over the past few years I have had a lot of interest in organic traffic. I decided to implement some of what we learned at Photagious to my personal site so I could continue to get a better understanding of how my site fits into the rest of the web. Proof is in the pudding and these tips landed me a job at Yahoo!.The resultsLet’s start with the most important stuff…results. As of right now this site has a Google PageRank of 3 and is generally on the first page of Google/Yahoo search results for “php developer resume“, “mysql developer resume“, “facebook developer resume“, “php developer portfolio” and “json developer resume” just to mention a few. It’s not by chance and I’ll outline what I did to get on the first page of those searches.Choose your keywordsIt’s important to determine your goal and who you want to bring to your site. If I had optimized for php website then it’s unlikely any recruiters would have wound up on it. So how did I go about picking my keywords? I started off by doing searches on Google and Yahoo. You’ll quickly see how the translate searches. For example if you Google php developer you’ll get a wide range of results. It’s a safe assumption that recruiters would learn quickly that searching for php developer doesn’t work and would try something like php developer resume. So I started there. Since that’s such a specific combination of keywords I also wanted to have a secondary set of keywords I wanted to optimize for (see above combinations).Are you smarter than a search engine?Search engines are pretty smart. But humans are smarter. However, instead of trying to trick the search engines it’s more advantageous to learn how they work. I’ve read a countless number of articles on SEO so I have a decent concept of what’s good and what’s bad in SEO land. My first objective was to create content which was relevant to keywords that recruiters would search on (i.e. php developer resume).I started by making sure that my URLs were clean and descriptive. Hover over the main tabs above to see where each one points. I also wanted to make sure that the page title was just as clear and descriptive. For every page on this site the title of the page contains PHP Developer and my name along with something relative to the content on that page (i.e. Portfolio). After that I added a footer to the site. This footer appears on every page and is a brief synopsis of what the site is about. I used that footer to highlight specific words and phrases by semantically emphasizing them (i.e. PHP, MySQL, Ajax, JSON). Realizing that search engines sometimes use meta tags to display a synopsis I spent a bit of time fine tuning my description and keyword meta tags.Content is kingI used CSS/HTML to help me tell search engines what items on a page were really important. Things like the heading of a page were put into h1 and h2 tags. Other important words were placed in strong or em tags. I re-emphasized my target keywords by adding them to the heading of each page. At this point every page has a high density of the keywords I’m advertising. They appear in one form or another in the title, meta tags, heading and footer of every page. I also kept the keywords in mind when writing content but didn’t rely too heavily on them.Your own personal webLinks are your friend if you understand how a search engine consumes them. There’s a direct correlation between the number of links on a page and their resulting values. So it’s important not to link every word on your page but rather do it naturally. When it makes sense to link to your resume from your portfolio - do it. It’s good for your readers and it’s good for you. Search engines understand that and reward you for it.Letting others helpThe more visibility your page gets then the more a search engine will like you. If you have a blog and you write about things others might be interested in then submit your stories to social media sites like del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon and reddit. If you’re lucky then you’ll wind up getting dugg but even if not then it’s still valuable.Measuring your progressIt’s extremely important to keep an eye on where you’re at and where you want to be. Don’t be afraid to make changes based on your research. If you decide you want to target different keywords then you should. Just go about it intelligently. I strongly recommend using analytics software so you have an idea of what keywords are working for you and where your traffic is coming from. If something works then make sure you keep it working - don’t get lazy.

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