Google Your Name
Google introduces us all the time.
People will Google our names ahead of a meeting, a doctor’s appointment, an interview, or a phone call. It’s the introduction before the re-introduction.
My favorite high school outfit that made it on Facebook, a short stint on a basketball team, an even shorter stint playing the viola, my alma mater, and more. Google remembers it all and can’t keep a secret.
“Google” is just a stand-in for all search engines. Bing, Brave, Kagi, DuckDuckGo all do the same thing. I just say “Google” because they dominate the search engine market share.
When meeting someone for the first time, if they’ve done any type of research, we aren’t introducing ourselves. We are re-introducing ourselves.
I set out to influence what Google has to say about me.
King and Jester of My Domain
I built a personal site to influence Google’s introduction. Here, I’m the king and the jester of the domain.
2 truths and 1 lie:
- I’ve gone 72 hours without sleep.
- I’ve eaten plantains every week of my life.
- I’m fluent in French.
Stew on this while you read. I’ll reveal the answer at the end.
I want this website to be the home for my online presence—professional interests, side quests, and community building. It is the landing pad for anything about Jarry. Instead of managing LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Medium separately, I can yap in one place.
Plus, I have more control over discoverability. I hear stories about how changes to search algorithms on social media sites can stunt a user’s reach. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is way more predictable.
That being said, when my site was two weeks old, search engines didn’t know about it yet. Which meant people could never find it.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall?
The Invisible Website
This Darwill post on click-through rates for Google’s search results states that the first page typically receives 92% of clicks, which are disproportionately skewed to the top three results.
I needed to get on that first page. And I did. I managed to rank my personal website in the top five Google search results in just one month.
Here is how I did it:
1. Directing the Traffic Search engine bots crawl a website to figure out what it’s about. I set up an automatic sitemap that gives Google a map of all my pages, with smart priorities (homepage gets the highest priority, blog posts get good priority, too). The robots.txt file points Google to that map so it can find everything easily.
2. Structured Data & Meta Tags This enables those nice “rich snippets” in search results with dates and author info. It helps the robots understand exactly what they are looking at.
3. Looking Good on Socials I added Open Graph tags for Facebook/LinkedIn and Twitter Cards. Now, when someone shares my link, it shows up with a proper title, description, and image instead of looking like a random, broken link.
4. Checking the Scoreboard I registered the site in Google Search Console. This lets me see how Google is crawling my site. It allows me to monitor performance, see what’s indexed, and submit sitemaps directly to Google for faster discovery.
There were a few other tweaks, like setting up Google Analytics to monitor my reach and making sure everything is responsive since Google cares about mobile these days.
There is plenty more, but I don’t want to bore yah.
The Verdict
I solved my introduction problem. If anyone Googles me now, my website will be within the first couple of clicks.
I still have some work to do on the other search engines, though. Bing doesn’t know my website exists at all.
2 truths and 1 lie: I’ve eaten plantains every week of my life. Every month for sure!