Written by Julia Gralki. Photo courtesy of Envato Elements.
It’s the summer holidays, a good time to work on your portfolio. Maybe you’ve already uploaded new projects to your website or you’re still tweaking recent designs. But one thing’s for sure: working on your portfolio doesn’t stop with clicking “publish” on your website.
To give your portfolio a life beyond LinkedIn and the occasional employer meeting, let me introduce you to SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization.
SEO helps your website rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP), so your portfolio shows up on page one or two of search results for certain keywords , which means you’ll be able to discover more potential customers or business owners.
Here are the top three things you need to do to optimize your portfolio for SEO:
1. Find your keywords
Keywords are words or phrases that we search for on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Once we hit the enter key, we are presented with thousands or billions of web pages containing these keywords. This means that if your website contains the keywords that people are searching for, it will appear on the first pages of results. To get there, you need to determine which keywords are relevant to your website.
For example, if you’ve designed interior spaces for a local Greek restaurant, name the posts or photos that your target audience can discover. Instead of being too specific and using too many location-related keywords, title it like “Modern Greek-Inspired Restaurant Interior Design in Savannah, Georgia.”
Now that you have your keywords, where do you put them?
There are several places that are crucial to getting your portfolio found by your audience, but some of them are more helpful than others.
Here is a list, in descending order of priority:
In the title (H1) In the URL of the post or page In the first paragraph of the introduction In the subheadings (H2 and H3), if possible Use it frequently within the description (but not too much) In the file name of image and alt tag in the meta description
2. Tell a story
Now, populate your portfolio pages or posts with content. The best way to do this is to include not only the end result, but also the “before” and “during”. By adding more text and photos, you also have the opportunity to add more keywords, but don’t add too many because Google penalizes websites that engage in “keyword stuffing”.
You can also add testimonials or customer reviews to enhance your design story.
3. Share your portfolio
If you’re not already doing so, be sure to share your portfolio on social media like LinkedIn, Instagram, or Pinterest. Sharing links online helps you build backlinks, which also improves your website’s performance, but that’s a story for another day.
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