The Tools I Am Using to Create the Portfolio and the Use of AI to Help Create the Site
- Claude AI (Perplexity) for helping code the website (mainly css)
- VS Code for coding the website
- Github for hosting my website
- Namecheap for my domain
- learningseo.io is my SEO roadmap
- A reputable Discord server for getting more personal 1-1 help in the SEO world
The Time I Am Taking to Study
Between being a full time college student and working full time, my schedule is pretty packed. But I'm squeezing in whatever time I can to learn SEO because I know these skills will help me land a job after graduation.
I found out through GitHub that students can get a free domain from Namecheap, so I jumped on that opportunity and built this portfolio you're reading right now. Over the next few weeks, I'll be picking up skills in web development, copywriting (which I definitely need to work on), and both technical and on-page SEO. My end goal for this project? Get to the #1 spot when you search my name. It's pretty niche, I know, but if I can rank for that, it'll show I know how to climb the search results.
Thanks for following along on my SEO journey as a complete beginner.
My Background in the Digital World
Before jumping into SEO, I spent my first day refreshing my web development and design skills. Instead of building everything from scratch, I used Claude AI to create a website template that I could customize for blogging. This way, I can focus more on learning SEO rather than getting stuck on development issues. I know enough to tweak things when needed and ask the right questions when I run into problems.
To prove my SEO skills, I'm not going to share this site's link with anyone directly (I will put it in my LinkedIn bio.) until I say so in a future blog post. So if you're reading this right now, you found it organically through searching my name which means I'm doing something right!
Key SEO Points I Have Learned in My First Week
Understanding How Google Searches Work
- Crawling (Crawler Robot, Spider): Is a robot that visits and downloads billions of websites to find out how fast the site loads and what is on the site.
- Indexing: After the bot crawls the page it analyzes the tags within the code such as
<title>,<h1>,<h2>,<p>, etc. It also analyzes the image alt text, images, videos, and any other elements within the page. Indexing also knows if your webpage is canonical or a copy/paste of another website. If the website is canonical, it will put it in a group against other webpages and using determining factors such as location, language, and usability to decide to put it on the search results page. - Serving Search Results: The search results depend on the keywords that the user searches for. It decides whether to send local results if you search "bike repair shops" or global results with images if you look up "Modern Bike" with the first search, every state or city would get something different but the second search could have the same results globally.
- Some changes can take weeks or months to take effect on the search engine.
- Using descriptive URLs and meta tags help! gavinallman.me/blogs/week-one is much more useful than gavinallman.me/blogs/2324421. Making good descriptions that call to searchers as well as not having duplicate webpages with different URLs all help your website.
- Google has a starter guide describing how Google searches work and maintaining your sites SEO by making "people-first" content.
Understanding Google Search Console
I added my site to google search engine while it only had a tiny bit of code that was just a placeholder so the site was not blank, and now my site looks like what you are on now and will continue to change the more I learn.
Google Search Console shows you:
- Performance such as clicks, impressions, average CTR, and the average position on the Google search engine.
- Indexing and if the website/video was indexed and if it was not, then it tells you the reason it was not indexed such as videos not loading, videos being too big, Javascript being too slow, etc.
- If HTTPS is enabled on each link of your website.
How to Make Your Website Seen
- Putting relevant and useful links in your website to other pages or other websites both help the search engine and users. It is important to trust the information that you are sending your readers to, the search engine will know where the user came from and the context. If you do not trust the website you are sending your users to, use the nofollow annotation.
- Meta keywords and keyword repetition DOES NOT help like you think it would.
- Promoting your website through social media, your community, advertising online and offline, and word of mouth are all good ways to get clicks and impressions on your website!
- Adding images, videos, and good Javascript help the SEO of your webpage as long as it is relevant to the text around it. Having an image of pizza for a pet store would probably not help you much.