SEO: How I achieved #1 in Google search results for full-stack developer portfolio

SEO is always a delightful topic. Let's start by showing off a couple really interesting results, then I'll break them down and try to draw some awesome conclusions out of it.

Here we have the most relevant end result. The following table is from the Search Analytics in my Google Search Console, ordered by the project's average position on Google's first page of results.

Despite being on a relatively young domain, the portfolio website is ranked really well for the Full-Stack Portfolio search. And it appears, on average, in first position for a couple of variations of the term.

The extensive list has at least 80 search terms for which the website appears on Google's first page of results. But for relevance's sake, let's take a look at the ones that drive the most traffic to it.

With an interesting position of 512,162 in Alexa's global ranking, organic search traffic currently accounts for a solid 15% to 20% of my monthly unique visitors.

The main goal of this article is to share my developer perspective on how my portfolio got here and what I learned in the process.

Lesson One — It's all about backlinks, y'all

I imagine that everyone professionally involved with web development should know the basic story behind the birth of the Google Search Engine and the basic principle of the PageRank Algorithm.

It's dead simple — it's all about links.

The more external links pointing to a webpage, the more relevant that webpage is considered to be. If those links are coming from well-ranked pages, you consequently get better rankings.

It's clear, it's straightforward and it's really clever.

No test that I've ever performed, from HTML structure and keyword text reviews to SSL and Structured Data implementations or performance improvements, has ever come close to having as much impact on page rankings as receiving backlinks from well-ranked domains.

One more thing

The text of the anchor link pointing to your website is really important, and it's something that's usually overlooked. It's treated as a high-value keyword by Google. Pay special attention to it, and if you have control over the website that's linking to yours, tweak it in a way that fits your keyword strategy.

You can check an example of that being used in the Author sections of my GitHub repositories — more on that later.

Seriously, you can very well stop reading this article at this point and go get yourself some backlinks. Everything else is secondary.

Lesson Two — My own backlink strategy

The strategy that you're going to use to acquire backlinks always depends on the goals of your specific project. In the case of an online portfolio, it really comes down to what kind of results you want out of it.

When I started crafting mine — back in 2014 – I had just won a couple of FWA Awards and wanted to showcase everything that I'd experienced at that time.

Due to our lifestyle and time constraints, we developers usually hold back when creating our own portfolio projects. I didn't.

I wanted this website to be a mesh of everything that I could accomplish, technology- and user-experience-wise.

So I did just that. I unleashed the inner-geek and didn't hold back, which consequently led to some really interesting results. It's amazing that, more often than not, when you put your heart into a project people seem to recognize it and share it.

And as we've established earlier, sharing and linking is going to make all the difference when it comes to your project's SEO success.

Awards submission, Web 2.0 and Open Source projects

As a starting point, this is an easy and impactful one. Submitting your website for evaluation on the web awards scene is a fast and reliable way of getting high-value backlinks. This is even more true if you're lucky enough to be featured in the awards section. You'll have the web community analyzing it, sending you feedback and helping with the initial propagation of your project.

It's also a known initial strategy to fill up every Web 2.0 online profile that you have with your website link. It may seem like a logical step, but you'd be impressed with how many people decide not to go all the way with it.

Again — you need to understand the importance of being serious about your backlink strategy. And you need to give it the right weight if you wanna get the most value from your project's SEO results.

Apart from that, I also have a couple relatively popular text editor extensions and UI components on my GitHub Repositories which have also helped grow my own backlink base.

Any Open Source work or publication that you have can help increase your visibility, and it will continue to be the most valuable asset in your SEO strategy.

Putting it together

Now please recall the aforementioned GitHub Author's section strategy. Consider that Atom.io, the NPM registry and others use the same README.md file to show your extension on their own domains.

Put that together with the crucial SEO relevance of anchor-text keywords and there you have it — great developer-focused backlink strategy 1 of 3.

While you can be a Zoe and understandably argue that these are all just meaningless no-follow links, please consider the possibility that this is not entirely true, as a lot of websites still don't mess with the original Markdown text structure.

Then one thing led to another 🎹 — and another

As I started climbing up the Google PageRank ladder my portfolio started to become an easy pick for Developer Portfolio Website Examples and List articles.

Let's check this by searching Google for the aforementioned Developer Portfolio — which is the search term that currently drives the most organic traffic to this website.

Analyzing a couple of articles from above the fold on the first page, you'll realize that the project is also featured in a couple of them.

Then again, well-ranked domains with related content linking to your project — that's the dream.

Lesson Three — And nothing else matters 🎸

One of the most important steps in creating any kind of project is to binge-analyze your competitors, which in this case was a peculiarly awesome experience. By doing that I came to the amazing realization that MR. Hetfield was right all along.

Please don't get me wrong. My intention was to nerd the shit out of this project and my goals were mostly UX and not SERP-centered. But it's interesting when you realize how little everything else matters SEO-wise.

Here is a list of improvements that you should definitely look to make on your website for non-SERP reasons. They all have great value for the experience that the user will get out of your project. Just keep in mind that their relevance to Google rankings is really thin.

The page load speed

Let's throw this bad boy on a couple of website performance tools, shall we?

I'm statically generating all webpages and hosting them with Netlify. They have a strong network of services and the interface is clean and straightforward.

This way, the website is distributed and accessed with low latency all around the globe, which is key for us web developers, as we usually have a distributed global audience.

The HTML, CSS, WebFonts, JS, and Web Components are minified, compressed and loaded asynchronously from a reduced number of sources. This way, the site serves as little content as possible and avoids unnecessary trips to the server.

Google SERP sentence: Low impact.

Ok, this one deserves an extra comment. We see a lot of developers getting way too much into these numbers and grades from the aforementioned performance analysis websites. The numbers are important and you'll get great development value from going through the experience of fixing all the small details.

But — there's no reason whatsoever for messing with the user experience or the maintainability of your project just to get that 💯 or an A grade on what is just a specific website analysis point of view on the page-load issue.

Don't go too deep on that rabbit hole. Rise above it. Focus on the user experience and maintainability of your code. They're way more important than the above-the-fold content not being fully rendered on the first hit for every page of your project.

Kudos if you're using Google's mod_pagespeed. It's indeed a great layer to add into your project — shamefully, I'm way too much of a control freak to use it.

SSL suit-up

Back in 2014 Google's official Webmaster Central Blog published an article about using HTTPS as a ranking signal. Since then, a lot has been speculated about what the actual weight of the security certificate in Google's ranking algorithm is.

To address this issue, I usually point to two pieces of information given by Google's own Gary Illyes. The first one is from this Google Hangout interview with Bruce Clay, where he states that SSL would act more as a tie-breaker in a very competitive website-ranking draw. The other one is this tweet exchange with Pete Meyers, stating that the idea of changing SSL's weight was revisited but that it is not currently in their plans.

From my own tests I have never found any indications of any competitive advantage whatsoever from having a secure domain.

That being said, SSL suiting up your website is essential if you're dealing with any kind of user data. It is not that relevant if your concerns are just SEO related.

Google SERP sentence: Same weight as an away goal.

Title tag structure

This is something that I came across not that long ago. Keyword position matters within the page title tag.

In this article, Moz proposes the following optimal format for page titles: Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name.

After some testing and competitor research I found it to have quite a real impact on the SERP position.

That's one of the reasons why, for now, I've removed my own name from the homepage title. When you use it together with the Person structured-data schema, Google usually rewrites your page title, setting your name/brand at the beginning of it.

Google SERP sentence: You should definitely look into it and perform a couple tests for each specific scenario.

That's all great! But why should I care?

The aforementioned improvements should definitely be implemented on every web project. They'll all affect how users and search engines perceive the experience of loading and navigating through your website.

Just keep in mind that, in terms of Google rankings and in comparison with backlinks, they are indeed far, far from relevant, even when all added together.

SEO Tools and a Subsequent Part II

Having a great tool set is really important. There are some great tools to analyze your website's SEO and compare it with others. Ahrefs, Moz and SEMrush are some of the best ones available, and they also have great SEO-related content in their blog articles.

Currently I'm really into Link-Assistant's SEO Power Suit. I've been using it for a while and even in the free version they have a couple really great tools available.

I'm still performing a couple tests and comparisons mainly regarding the new blog structure, structured data and the homepage content thickness. I'll try to put that together with some tool reviews and organize an episode II of this article.

To help with that, I would really appreciate it if you guys could give some feedback and share your own experiences in the comments below. 👇🏻