Written by Julia Gralki. Photo Courtesy of Envato Elements.
To celebrate the portfolio-building season (aka summer,) let’s discuss how search engine optimization can increase your portfolio website’s visibility. If you have missed the first part of this series, check out “3 essential SEO tips for your online portfolio.”
But first, why is SEO so important?
SEO makes your portfolio website more visible, so potential employers or clients are more likely to discover your online presence.
Here are a few advanced SEO best practices you should remember when working on your portfolio this summer.
1. Web hosting and website domain
Many website builders let you create your website for free, as long as you keep the website builder’s domain. However, that has one major downside: Your site likely won’t show up in the search results. If you want your portfolio to be discoverable via Google search, paying a small monthly fee is the better choice.
Here are some more tips for selecting your domain: Keep them short and free of numbers or characters. Regarding SEO, include keywords related to your industry or name.
2. Optimize your images for SEO
The odds are that your portfolio contains many images if you are an artist. But images don’t have text, so how can they be important for SEO, which is keyword-based? There are many answers to this question.
Images improve user experience, one of the factors search engines consider when ranking websites in the search results. Websites that contain both text and images rank better than those which greet you with just a block of text.
To further improve user experience, make sure to downscale your images. If they are too large, they can slow down your page when loading, hurting your website’s performance in Google searches.
Now, to make your images (or artworks) discoverable, don’t forget to add alt text before uploading them. Alt text helps search engines to catalog pictures according to their content, which makes your work more visible. You can describe your images in 125 words or fewer to tell search engines what the image is about.
3. Link building
The previous article about SEO tips for your online portfolio briefly mentioned link building. Link building means creating backlinks to your website, which gives your website credibility in the eyes of search engines.
You can build backlinks by getting your work featured on other websites. If your portfolio website includes a blog, you can also create backlinks by guest blogging.
Speaking of links, don’t forget to add internal links as well. By linking to your works on various website pages, you help visitors navigate your site.
