With all the excitement that comes with starting your own blog, and wondering when Google will get around to crawling my new pages, I began to wonder where I stand in rankings currently. Granted, while I built my portfolio site with SEO in mind, I never really put much effort into enhancing it’s placement—largely because I never needed to. I was always applying for jobs, seeking them out, and never really had to worry about anyone ever looking for me.

But now that I’m <sarcasm>going to be a big blogger,</sarcasm> I got curious about where I currently stand. Because the content on my existing website is largely images with very brief descriptions, it’s not really scoring much in the way of SEO points. But blog articles are quite different. (Yay SEO fodder!) A quick Google search on my the name “Scott Springer” revealed some disturbing news. There are a bunch of Scott Springers from a variety of professions (Educators, doctors, musicians— thankfully I’m the only Scott Springer The Web Designer). The third link in is actually a blog article by some marketing guy bashing someone with my name. Even though it’s some other guy, it was still pretty disturbing to see something that spiteful with my name attached.

I finally found a link to my web design portfolio all the way down at number 28. Not too bad for no SEO, and using just my name as the keywords. I’ve kept a pretty low profile online up until now, so just for shits and giggles, I decided to check out myself on the image search too. The only photo of myself in the first 100 results was a photo from a high school alumni event back in 2002. It was on the first page—in this case, unfortunately, because i have a self-inflicted buzz cut, and odd-looking ho-chi-minh beard.

As an exercise, I’m going to make an effort to drive up my placement in Google’s results over the next couple months. Because I have absolutely no timeframe or traffic goals, I’m going to take my time and tweak one element at a time. By checking the results regularly, It will allow me to paint a fairly clear picture of what impact each action has. The basic principles are pretty easy. This is the order that I think I’m going to follow:

1. Generate keyword-rich content
   • Focus on my name, Scott Springer
   • Focus on relevant keywords, like web designer and online portfolio (See what I did just there? I put my name right next to two relevant words that I want associated with it.)
2. Secure inbound links with my target keywords in the link
3. Post more images of myself, making sure my name appears in the alt tag, and title tag
4. Post more images of myself, making sure my name appears in text immediately surrounding the image

So with any luck, over the next several months, I’ll become a much more popular Scott Springer. Maybe one day people will actually look at Jerry and ask him, “Are you related to Scott!?”

Ok, that might be a bit unlikely.